From my personal experiences, I’ve noticed that Latinx students and families are most receptive to college-related information communicated as anecdotes. Latinx students are among the most poorly represented demographic at universities nationwide, which I believe can be mitigated through calculated efforts to increase collegiate literacy and understanding. This project is...
Barley yellow dwarf (BYD) is a damaging luteovirus disease responsible for reduced tillering, delayed heading, sterility, and stunting in many cereals worldwide. Well-characterized resistance genes to barley yellow dwarf viruses (BYDV) are scarce and genes conferring tolerance to BYDV are limited in wheat. In an attempt to generate plants with...
Group foraging occurs across many ecosystems and taxa, and benefits some or all individuals in the group by optimizing feeding efficiency. The beater theory describes when individual “beaters” benefit other group members by herding prey into more accessible areas. Humpback whales feed on a variety of small patchy prey, and...
Agrobacterium tumefaciens and Rhodococcus fascians are plant pathogenic bacteria that can induce crown and leafy galls on plants, respectively. Infection by these bacteria results in disfigured, unsellable plants, leading to significant economic losses to the nursery industry. A. tumefaciens and R. fascians are capable of infecting a broad range of...
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted disparities in land access and food security. Research has shown that access to gardening reduces financial burdens on low-income households. Compared to homeowners, individuals and families in rental housing face added barriers to vegetable gardening and growing food. These barriers include rental housing regulations and the...
We construct the contact value approximation (CVA) for the pair distribution function,
g(²)(r₁, r₂), for an inhomogeneous hard sphere fluid. The CVA is an average of two radial
distribution functions, which each take as input the distance between the particles, |r₂ −r₁|,
and the average value of the radial distribution...
Enduracidin is an antibiotic produced by Streptomyces fungicidicus that is effective against Gram-positive bacteria. Previous work identified seventy-eight mutations in an S. fungicidicus strain that produces a significantly higher level of enduracidin than the wild type strain, ATCC 21013. Eleven mutations were analyzed individually to identify those that may contribute...
The safety of the chemical glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide RoundUpTM, has been questioned on numerous occasions. Previous studies suggest that glyphosate-containing herbicides have deleterious effects on a variety of organisms; other studies suggest that these effects may be minor, transient, or non-existent altogether. Proper maintenance of microbial...
Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone have each left their mark on popular culture. Charlie Brooker and Rod Serling created television shows with macabre and imaginative concepts and brought them to the small screen. “This is like something straight out of The Twilight Zone!” has become a common phrase since...
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), including benzo[a]pyrene (B[a]P), are environmental pollutants linked to increased disease susceptibilities. Alpha-Tocopherol (αT) supplementation decreases B[a]P-DNA adducts in smokers, particularly women; but the mechanism is unknown. To test the hypothesis that αT protection from B[a]P exposure is gender-dependent, male and female rats received 7 daily subcutaneous...