Circadian clocks coordinate molecular, cellular, physiological, and behavioral processes with the 24-hour solar day. While clock functions are well understood in young animals, it is not clear how aging or neurodegenerative disease affects the various levels of the circadian system. A common symptom of many neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease...
The utility of high-throughput, computational screening has become an invaluable asset to the field of materials science. In the hierarchy of computational methods, the most accurate methods are often the most computationally expensive. However, as both the efficiency and fidelity of numerical techniques advance, high-quality screening of large materials datasets...
The focus of this thesis is to design, characterize, and apply novel computational methods and molecular systems to interrogate heterogeneous human gut microbiome-related phenomena. In Chapter 2, I design, implement, and characterize a method for embedding co-occurrence patterns derived from massive 16s amplicon datasets. I use this method to 1....
The vascular endothelium is a single cell layer that lines the lumen of the entire vasculature. It is the site of synthesis of nitric oxide (NO), a vasodilatory compound synthesized by endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS). NO causes intracellular calcium sequestration of the vascular smooth muscle cells, relaxing and dilating...
Managers of forest and plantation ecosystems are encountering growing problems involving plant pathogens and the expanding geographic ranges of these pathogens. Historically unexposed stands are exceptionally vulnerable when a non-native pathogen is introduced because these pathogens can cause devastating disease in a host population that lacks co-evolved resistance mechanisms. One...
Aromatic heterocycles are core structural motifs in natural products, pharmaceuticals and biological polymers. Indoles, in particular, represent a significant subclass of aromatic heterocycles, both in terms of sheer numbers, but also in biological and pharmaceutical relevance. As such, new methodologies for the synthesis of indoles represent an important and continually...
¿Cómo se implican los bibliotecarios españoles en Wikipedia (y en Wikidata, Wikisource, y otros proyectos hermanos deWikipedia) en tanto que organizadores del movimiento Wikimedia? Y, ¿qué les motiva? Este artículo sobre los hallazgos surgidos a raíz de 14 entrevistas realizadas a 18 bibliotecarios.Los entrevistados eran plurilingües y colaboraban con proyectos...
Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across...
The ecologically and socio-economically important marine ecosystems of Europe are facing severe threats from a variety of human impacts. To mitigate and potentially reverse some of these impacts, the European Union (EU) has mandated the implementation of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) in order to achieve Good Environmental Status...