Endothelial activation with increased expression of cellular adhesion molecules, chemokines and pro-inflammatory cytokines critically contributes to vascular inflammation and the initiation and progression of atherosclerosis. By affecting redox-sensitive cell signaling pathways and transcription factors, redox-active transition metal ions, such as copper and iron, may play an important role in these...
To reduce the environmental impacts caused by gene flow from transgenic trees, reproductive sterility genes have been developed that use a floral regulatory element linked to a cell toxin. This results in dysfunction or ablation of floral tissues, causing sterility. However, floral promoters often permit low levels of expression in...
Sequential supervised learning problems arise in many real applications. This dissertation focuses on two important research directions in sequential supervised learning: efficient training and feature induction.
In the direction of efficient training, we study the training of conditional random fields (CRFs), which provide a flexible and powerful model for sequential...
Plethodontid salamanders have served as an informative vertebrate system for studying the role of chemical signals in facilitating social and reproductive behaviors. Individuals produce complex mixtures of chemicals from multiple glandular regions. In total, these secretions convey a wide variety of information, and are important for numerous inter- and intraspecific...
In this dissertation, I describe the experimental investigation in electron diffraction of molecules in superfluid helium droplets. The project is part of an overall scheme called ‘single molecule serial electron diffraction imaging’ (SS-EDI), with the ultimate goal of building an apparatus to determine atomic structures from oriented macromolecules. In SS-EDI,...
The main contributions of this thesis are the development and
application of four computationally efficient solutions for
least-squares-based (LS-based) minimum variance spectral estimation
(MVSE). They are: (1) fast computational solution for the 1-D
covariance LS-based MVSE, (2) fast computational solution for the
1-D modified covariance LS-based MVSE, (3) fast computational...
The structural architecture present in marine toxin azaspiracid - 20 stereocenters, 9 rings, 3 separated spirocenters - has attracted considerable synthetic attention. Our efforts toward the synthesis of azaspiracid have led to the completion of both C₁-C₂₆ northern and C₂₇-C₄₀ southern halves. Herein, the
synthesis of southern FGHI ring system...
Cystic ovarian disease (COD) is an anovulatory condition in cattle
that afflicts between 6-18% of all dairy cows in the US. Ovulation is
dependent on the plasminogen activator (PA) family of proteases
and protease inhibitor for proteolysis, culminating in follicular rupture.
Failure of the follicle to ovulate suggests an aberration...
We demonstrate a novel synthetic route to fabricate a one-dimensional
peapod-like Sb@C structure with disperse Sb
submicron-particles encapsulated in carbon submicron-tubes.
The synthetic route may well serve as a general methodology
for fabricating carbon/metallic fine structures by thermally
reducing their carbon-coated metal oxide composites.
Animals must manage interactions with beneficial as well as detrimental microbes. Immunity therefore includes strategies for both resistance to and tolerance of microbial invaders. Transforming growth factor beta (TGFβ) cytokines have many functions in animals including a tolerance-promoting (tolerogenic) role in immunity in vertebrates. TGFβ pathways are present in basal...