The agricultural production of peppermint has been shown to contribute significant quantities of nitrate-nitrogen to groundwater recharge. In an effort to provide new tools for increasing nitrogen efficiency within peppermint production, three research questions were proposed: i) How should plant tissue samples be collected to achieve the greatest precision when...
Passive capillary samplers (PCAPS), which sample water from the vadose zone via a hanging water column in a fiberglass wick, have shown potential to provide superior estimates of soil water flux compared to alternative methods. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the performance of PCAPS under natural rain-fed...
The purpose of this project was to investigate play and our cultural assumptions as to its usefulness or lack there of. The concepts of hard work versus hard play were explored in order to discover when human beings are operating at their best. In terms of innovation and productivity in...
In plants, microRNAs (miRNAs) comprise one of two classes of small RNAs that function primarily as negative regulators at the posttranscriptional level. Several MIRNA genes in the plant kingdom are ancient, with conservation extending between angiosperms and the mosses, whereas many others are more recently evolved. Here, we use deep...
Eukaryotes contain a diversified set of small RNA-guided pathways that control genes, repeated sequences, and viruses at the transcriptional and posttranscriptional levels. Genome-wide profiles and analyses of small RNAs, particularly the large class of 24-nucleotide (nt) short interfering RNAs (siRNAs), were done for wild-type Arabidopsis thaliana and silencing pathway mutants...
The advent of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) methods has enabled direct approaches to quantitatively profile small RNA
populations. However, these methods have been limited by several factors, including representational artifacts and lack of
established statistical methods of analysis. Furthermore, massive HTS data sets present new problems related to data processing
and...
Part 1: A Diels-Alder Approach to the Synthesis of Novel Analogues of the Natural
Product Siamenol
Due to the prevalence of biaryl motifs in natural product synthesis, the Carter
research group has been exploring the utility of a Diels-Alder approach to biaryl
synthesis. The Diels-Alder approach involves a [4+2] cycloaddition...
A major goal in greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus, hereafter ‘sage-grouse’) conservation is to spend limited resources efficiently by conserving large and functioning populations. We used maximum count data from leks (n = 4,885) to delineate high abundance population centers that contain 25, 50, 75, and 100% of the known breeding...
Alternative male phenotypes in salmonine fishes arise from individuals that mature as larger and older anadromous marine-migrants or as smaller and younger freshwater residents. To better understand the processes influencing the expression of these phenotypes we examined the influences of growth in length (fork length) and whole body lipid content...
Predatorprey interactions are a primary structuring force vital to the resilience of marine communities and sustainability of the worlds oceans. Human influences on marine ecosystems mediate changes in species interactions. This generality is evinced by the cascading effects of overharvesting top predators on the structure and function of marine ecosystems....