The Cobb Seamount Chain in the northeast Pacific basin records the composition of the Cobb hot spot for the past 33 Myr, as the migrating Juan de Fuca Ridge approached and ultimately overran it ca. 0.5 Myr ago. In this first comprehensive geochemical study of the Cobb chain, major and...
This thesis characterizes the feedback between the instructor and student teams engaged in a Virtual Bioreactor (VBioR) Laboratory Project. The project allows senior-level chemical, biological, and environmental engineering students to apply their developing knowledge and skills in an industrially situated process optimization project. Feedback is an important tool for instructors...
The Marquesas archipelago is a short. NW-SE trending cluster of islands and seamounts that formed as a result of volcanic activity over a weak hotspot. This volcanic chain lies at the northern margin of a broad region of warm and compositionally diverse mantle that melts to build several other subparallel...
Human liver cancer is one of the deadliest cancers worldwide, with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) being the most common type. Aberrant Ras signaling has been implicated in the development and progression of human HCC, but a complete understanding of the molecular mechanisms of this protein in hepatocarcinogenesis remains elusive. In this...
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is currently one of the top lethal cancers with an increasing
trend. Deregulation of MYC in HCC is frequently detected and always correlated with poor
prognosis. As the zebrafish genome contains two differentially expressed zebrafish myc
orthologs, myca and mycb, it remains unclear about the oncogenicity of...
Efficient methods for simulating the substrate noise generated by complex synchronous and asynchronous digital logic circuits are presented. By simulating digital logic at the gate level, and precharacterizing the gates, the substrate noise generation can be predicted and used in a transistor level simulation of the sensitive analog blocks. This...
Infection with Helicobacter pylori is a major risk factor for the development of gastric cancer, and infection with strains carrying the virulence factor CagA significantly increases this risk. To investigate the mechanisms by which CagA promotes carcinogenesis, we generated transgenic zebrafish expressing CagA ubiquitously or in the anterior intestine. Transgenic...
Myc is a pleiotropic transcription factor that is involved in many cellular activities relevant to carcinogenesis, including hepatocarcinogenesis. The zebrafish has been increasingly used to model human diseases and it is particularly valuable in helping to identify common and conserved molecular mechanisms in vertebrates. Here we generated a liver tumor...
Because Ras signaling is frequently activated by major hepatocellular carcinoma etiological factors, a transgenic zebrafish constitutively expressing the kras(V12) oncogene in the liver was previously generated by our laboratory. Although this model depicted and uncovered the conservation between zebrafish and human liver tumorigenesis, the low tumor incidence and early mortality...
The goal of this dissertation was to improve our abilities in acquiring critical in vivo data by establishing embryo-larva zebrafish as an exemplary model to quantitatively evaluate cancer progression. The living environment that encompasses a tumor has a significant effect on how cancer develops, grows and metastasizes. In order to...