Microbial communities in Arctic coastal lagoons drive biogeochemical cycles at the terrestrial-marine interface and help to determine the fate and form of resources like nitrogen (N) and carbon (C) as they are delivered to the Arctic Ocean. Though rising rates of primary production in the Arctic Ocean are well-characterized, the...
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...
Coral reef ecosystems continue to be significantly altered by disease epizootics, but why some host populations remain resistant while others succumb to outbreaks remains unknown. Research across diverse animal and plant host systems has revealed that disease severity is strongly influenced by host genetics and by environmental influences on both...
Causal inference is an important analytical tool to bridge the gap between prediction and decision-making. However, learning a causal network solely from data is a challenging task. In this work, various techniques have been explored for a better and improved causal network learning from data. Firstly, the problem of learning...
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)...
All animals have developed the critical ability to detect, respond to, and detoxify a large array of environmental chemicals and stressors that can cause adverse health effects. Important examples of landmark contaminants around the world are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and dioxins, both of which can act via the aryl...
All mammals host communities of commensal microbes in and on their bodies. Recent technological advances, combined with experimental studies in laboratory animals, are beginning to reveal the ubiquitous links between the gut microbiome and host disease, metabolism, immunity, and numerous other host functions. A new challenge of microbiome research is...
Potato Virus Y (PVY) is an enduring problem for potato production worldwide. Potato varieties that resist the “ordinary” strain PVYO were developed by breeders, but in recent years, recombinant strains of PVY have been able to circumvent this strain-specific resistance and evade growers and seed certification officials by causing fewer...
In this research, we address the problem of learning a single causal network structure from multiple dataset generated from different experiments. The experiments can be observational or interventional. We assume that each dataset is generated by an unknown causal network altered under different experimental conditions (interventions, manipulation or perturbation). As...
Biotic and abiotic processes at continent-ocean interfaces cycle a disproportionate mass of carbon and nutrients relative to their global surface area, and microbial activity is a principal determinant of organic and inorganic matter flux in these transition zones. Most studies using modern high-throughput ‘omics techniques to link microorganisms with costal...