Given the many significant roles that bacteria play in modern food manufacturing, it is crucial that we have a fundamental understanding of how bacterial communities assemble and behave in the food manufacturing environment. The focus of this dissertation was to investigate both the spatial and temporal distributions of microbial communities...
Climate change is causing people around the world to experience extreme temperature and air pollution events such as wildfires more frequently, and for longer periods of time. Extreme heat events have been widely associated with an increased risk of emergency room visits, occupational heat-related injuries and illnesses, and mortality overall...
The reduction in mechanical load imparted on the body during spaceflight presents unique physiological challenges. One detrimental and seemingly unavoidable response to microgravity is rapid bone loss. This adaptation is hazardous not only to astronaut health, but to the success of long-duration exploration-class missions. Skeletal adaptation to spaceflight in astronauts...
Soft matter encapsulates a large array of materials ranging from electronics, plastics, and cosmetics to the biofluids making up all organisms. One of the most important properties of these materials that dictate their functionality is their rheology, which is the flow and deformation behavior in response to stress. The focus...
Clostridium perfringens type A strains are one of the main causative agents of gastrointestinal (GI) diseases in human and can cause both food poisoning (FP) and non-food-borne (NFB) diseases. Several factors contribute to the pathogenesis of C. perfringens type A strains including the wide presence of C. perfringens spores with...
Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a leading cause of acute gastroenteritis associated with consumption of seafood, particularly raw oysters. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that 45,000 cases of V. parahaemolyticus infection occur each year in the U.S. A recent CDC report revealed that the incidence of...
Microscale reactors operate in sub millimeter space dimensions. Their small length scale enables process intensification of mass, heat and momentum transport that influence reaction rates. Hence it's possible to observe the true intrinsic reaction kinetics occurring for a set of reactions. In this work a novel microscale reactor for producing...
High counts of fecal indicators, used to signal the potential presence of pathogens associated with untreated waste, result in the classification of water bodies throughout the United States as impaired. Nonpoint sources of unknown origin that contribute to fecal contamination make management of impaired waters challenging, as they are difficult...
Obesity and metabolic syndrome (MetS) affect over 1.9 billion adults and 12.7 million youth in the US. If all of today’s obese American youth become obese adults, the total societal costs over their lifetime may exceed $1.1 trillion. We show that feeding rodents a high-fat diet supplemented with xanthohumol (XN)...
This investigation was motivated by the introduction of the new
nearest neighbour analyses which reportedly provided a better control
of soil gradients than conventional experimental methods.
Three nearest neighbour analyses and six other analyses were
compared with the completely randomized design or the randomized
complete block design in reducing the...