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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
Aspects of global change - specifically, elevated soil nitrogen deposition and warming - are resulting in significant changes in native plant communities. These effects can be direct through changes in productivity, or indirect through...
Snake Venom Composition, Adaptation, and Evolution: Comparative Transcriptomic and Proteomic Analyses of Venoms from the Cottonmouth (Agkistrodon Piscivorus) and the Copperhead (Agkistrodon Contortrix)
Understanding how organisms adapt to their environments is one of the fundamental goals of biology. However, delineating the exact relationships between genotypes, phenotypes, and fitness can be difficult in natural systems. Studying...
Changes in gene expression determine cellular differentiation and developmental programs as cells transform from a progenitor to a mature adult state. The difference in the organization of the nucleus between undifferentiated cells and...
This study produces a nearly comprehensive large-scale molecular phylogeny for the marine bivalve family Cardiidae (Cockels and Giant clams) and uses this topology to examine patterns of diversification in the marine realm. This study...
Growth over ontogeny can profoundly affect the form and function of biological structures. Since animal performance is tightly linked to morphological specialization, ontogenetic change in size may help structure that organism's...
Globally, species diversity is regulated by speciation and extinction, and regionally it is regulated by competition, niche, colonization, emigration, and extinction, and more locally, by environmental tolerance and species interactions...
A hallmark of cancerous transformation is altered chromosome structure. Inappropriate regulation of chromatin structure inhibits normal cell function, and may represent the origin of transformation. A handful of important studies have...
Among flowering plants, floral form is inherently linked to reproductive success and is therefore a key element in the evolution of angiosperm lineages. Variations in floral form and associated mating systems have demonstrated that...
Normal cardiac function involves the highly regulated switching of contraction on and off by Ca2+-dependent conformational changes in the troponin-tropomyosin complex. A myriad of factors, both biochemical and mechanical, adaptively...
Biologists have long been interested in the diversity of organisms on earth. With their joint presentation to the Linnean Society of London in 1858, Darwin and Wallace proposed natural selection as a clear mechanism to explain the...
Estuaries are one of the most ecologically and economically valuable habitats on earth in part due to high nutrient inputs from their associated watersheds that supports high productivity of fish populations. While numerous studies have...
The Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) states that an individual is dead when "all functions of the entire brain" have ceased irreversibly. However, it has been questioned whether some functions of the hypothalamus, particularly...
BCL6, a protooncogene, is most commonly involved in diffuse large cell lymphomas (DLCL) which is the most common form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. BCL6 recruits a number of transcriptional corepressors including BCL6 corepressor (BCoR) to...
The degree to which ontogenetic data could facilitate the understanding of phylogenetic relationships has long been a subject of contention in evolutionary biology. Known occurrences of paedomorphosis have invalidated strict adherences...
Depression, anxiety, and impairments in learning and memory are all associated with traumatic brain injury (TBI). While zinc deficiency has been correlated with depression, supplemental zinc appears to have antidepressant effects in both...
Ecological systems are dynamic, yet many experimental studies examine plant-herbivore interactions as from a simple, static, or single perspective. Reciprocal interactions can have profound effects on communities, and ignoring such...
Upland forests in the southeastern United States (U.S.) were once dominated by the pyrogenic longleaf pine (Pinus palustris)-bunchgrass ecosystem that extended south from Virginia to Florida and west to East Texas. Historical land...
Computational analysis of cDNA sequences from multiple organisms suggests that a large portion of transcribed DNA does not code for a functional protein. As studies begin to delve into the possible functions of these noncoding...
Hardbottom habitats in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico provide a variety of valuable ecological goods and services including functioning as nursery habitats and providing refuge for resident organisms. In this study, I identified the...
The small golden ant Pheidole morrisi Forel is the most common ant of the Apalachicola National Forest, a typical longleaf pine flat-woods ecosystem and is found in pine forests across the eastern U.S. P. morrisi likely plays a...
The developmental stages of plants and animals are critical as well as highly susceptible to environmental conditions and predation. Organisms have evolved many different methods for dealing with problems such as larval exposure to...
The Influence of Morphology, Skeletal Characteristics, and Investment in Defensive Chemistry on the Growth, Reattachment, and Regeneration of Caribbean Coral Reef Sponges and Its Application to Coral Reef Restoration
Restoration is increasingly implemented to reestablish habitat structure and function following natural and anthropogenic physical disturbances, but scientific knowledge of the effectiveness of methods lags behind demand for guidelines....
Biomechanics and the Ontogeny of Feeding in the American Alligator (Alligator Mississippiensis): Reconciling Factors Contributing to Intraspecific Niche Differentiation in a Large Bodied Vertebrate
As vertebrates attain a larger body size, the relative growth of various body parts results in differential rates of growth across the organism and may result in substantial impacts on mechanical performance. To deal with this problem, ...
Macro histone H2A (macroH2A) is a variant of core histone H2A that differs primarily by an extensive carboxy-terminal tail of unknown function that makes up two-thirds of the protein's mass. The histone variant is distributed throughout...
Ever since Darwin published The Origin of Species, creationists have offered a competing explanation for the diversity of life on earth and its features. This paper addresses several commonly encountered topics of controversy between...
Humans are largely dependent upon cone-mediated vision. However, death or dysfunction of rods, the predominant photoreceptor subtype, results in secondary loss of cones, remodeling of retinal circuitry, and blindness. The changes in...
The value of estuaries as nursery habitat for juvenile fishes depends on their connection with coastal watersheds that provide nutrients, freshwater, and other materials essential to the productivity of these ecosystems. This...
Characterizing the Relationship Between Williams Syndrome Transcription Factor and Heterochromatin Maintenance Through the Targeted Disruption of the BAZ1B Gene
Maintaining genome integrity and epigenetic programming is essential to avoid disease and retain the identity and proper function of the multitude of specialized differentiated cell types in the body. Much progress has been made in the...
Olfaction allows vertebrates to sense their chemical environment, and plays an important role in feeding behavior, reproduction, memory and learning. The first portion of the dissertation examined the signal transduction cascade in the...
The amount, composition, and configuration of habitat in the surrounding landscape can affect the structure of local communities, how those communities interact, and the ecosystem functions they perform. In the following chapters I...
The time at which DNA replicates during S-phase (replication timing; RT) is a precisely orchestrated, yet large-scale epigenetic property that offers an unparalleled window into the structure and regulation of the genome. While the...
Symbioses are pervasive in life and confer novel adaptive capabilities that enable ecological expansion into unexplored niches. Evolutionary transitions in symbiosis (terminations, origins, host shifts, or changes in relationship...
Community structure and trophic ecology of sharks and large teleost fishes in seagrass beds of the Florida Big Bend were investigated using fishery-independent longline and gillnet surveys and stable isotope analyses. The Big Bend is...
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is an enveloped RNA virus that often manifests into chronic infections of the liver, which represents a threat to human health due to the morbidity it presents within infected patients. The virus is especially...
Competition for shared consumable resources is an important form of competition and has been investigated using mechanistic models of consumer and resource growth. The shape of the relationship between consumption and resource density...
Circadian rhythms are 24-hour daily rhythms in transcription, translation, hormone release, electrical activity, and other behaviors. Rhythms are primarily generated in different brain areas and tissues by input from the suprachiasmatic...
DNA replication in eukaryotic cells follows a temporal order that is consistent from cell cycle to cell cycle and is correlated with the spatial organization of DNA in the nucleus. This "replication-timing program" is conserved in...
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) has emerged as a major cause of human liver disease, with ~3% of the world population persistently infected with and more than one million new cases of infection reported annually. In most cases, HCV escapes the...
Biocompatible coatings are often used to improve fixation between implants and tissues. Polyelectrolyte multilayer (PEMU) coatings built layer by layer with alternating pairs of polyelectrolytes can be tuned to improve cell interactions...
Recent years have seen a dramatic worldwide increase in allergies and asthma that can now be described as reaching epidemic proportions. Food allergies affect approximately 2% of the adult population and up to 6% of the pediatric...
The Notch signaling pathway is a means of cell-to-cell communication during vertebrate and invertebrate development that regulates aspects of cell cycle exit, cell type specification and differentiation. In the nervous system, Notch is...
The Drosophila somatic follicle cells are excellent for the study of cell-cycle regulation and cell differentiation. During oogenesis, the follicle cells go through three variations of cell cycle programs, the mitotic cycle, the...
The maize genome is highly complex and repetitive, with almost 85% of the genome encoding transposable elements (TE). The movement of TE can have deleterious effects on a genome. In maize, one model for transcriptional gene silencing ...
Tree nuts are a widely consumed food and include walnut, cashew, almond, hazelnut, pistachio, pecan, chestnut, macadamia, and Brazil nut. Although enjoyed safely by most individuals, allergic reactions are common and ~0.6% of the US...
A proper balance between the phosphorylation and dephosphorylation of intracellular substrates in several brain regions is necessary for learning. conditioned taste aversion (CTA) has several properties that make it an advantageous model...
Plants are fed upon by a range of insect foragers, including herbivores and pollinators. Because herbivores damage plant parts and pollinators transfer pollen among plants, plants generally benefit by avoiding herbivores and attracting...
Myocardial contractions are generated by the binding of myosin motor proteins to cardiac actin in the thin filament. This process is regulated by the binding of calcium ions to troponin C. When Ca2+ binds to site II of troponin C, the...
The southwest Australian floristic region (SWAFR) is considered one of the world's biodiversity hotspots (Myers et al. 2000). Almost half of its 7380 native plant species are endemic to the region, and more than a quarter of the total...
Many animals, including humans, choose their source of nutrition based on the nutritive value and the flavor (i.e, odor, taste and texture) of available foods. Sweet taste is one of the more potent orosensory stimuli that contributes to...
Many genetic patterns observed within and between species are often attributed to processes that affect interpopulation genetic exchange. These patterns are often taken as evidence of the genetic processes without explicit tests of the...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
