The isoprenoid pathway is one of the major biosynthetic pathways of secondary metabolites. Isoprenoids with a C₂₀ skeleton are known as diterpenoids and are derived from the common precursor, geranylgeranyl diphosphate (GGPP). This dissertation describes approaches to discover the diterpene synthase enzymes which provide the backbone structures for pleuromutilin and...
Animals aggregate and interact in nonuniform and nonrandom patterns, which lead to group level characteristics that have important evolutionary and ecological consequences. Network analysis provides a useful conceptual framework for linking animal interactions at all scales from dyads to communities, to populations and ecosystems. Despite exciting theoretical and applied advances...
Software systems are becoming an essential part of the lives of both individuals and organizations, and as a consequence, these systems are getting bigger and more complex. Because of this, the tasks of maintaining the quality in these complex software systems are becoming increasingly difficult. Furthermore, these systems are subject...
The objective of this dissertation is to enhance the monitoring of forest ecosystems through the utilization of remotely sensed data to address the exigencies posed by the Anthropocene. On a global scale, rising temperatures and fluctuating precipitation patterns have strained forests and produced shifts in natural disturbance regimes. Additionally, the...
Mathematical modeling plays a pivotal role in understanding the mechanism of radiation-induced cellular effects, and also in quantifying the radiation risk to the cell. However, there are still compelling challenges facing the conventional modeling in radiobiology, such as lacking a generalized theory structure of quantifying target effect and non-target effect...
Proceedings of the Eighteenth Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade, held July 11-15, 2016 at Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Center (AECC), Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.
Developers frequently change the type of a program element and update all its references for performance, security, concurrency, library migration, or better maintainability. Despite type changes being a common program transformation, it is the least automated and the least studied. Manually performing type changes is tedious since the programmers have...
The development of a transient electric birefringence (TEB) apparatus for macroparticle characterization is herein discussed. The experimental difficulties encountered were related largely to poor data resolution. Misalignment and strain birefringence in optical components further complicated results. Improved data digitization methods were developed, and precise mathematical models were derived in order...
Learning novel concepts from relational databases is an important problem with applications in several disciplines, such as data management, natural language processing, and bioinformatics. For a learning algorithm to be effective, the input data should be clean and in some desired representation. However, real-world data is usually heterogeneous – the...