ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- All Subjects: Biology
- Creators: Creath, Richard
- Creators: Martins, Emilia
Description
The academic literature on science communication widely acknowledges a problem: science communication between experts and lay audiences is important, but it is not done well. General audience popular science books, however, carry a reputation for clear science communication and are understudied in the academic literature. For this doctoral dissertation, I utilize Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape, a general audience science book on the particularly thorny topic of neuroscientific approaches to morality, as a case-study to explore the possibility of using general audience science books as models for science communication more broadly. I conduct a literary analysis of the text that delimits the scope of its project, its intended audience, and the domains of science to be communicated. I also identify seven literary aspects of the text: three positive aspects that facilitate clarity and four negative aspects that interfere with lay public engagement. I conclude that The Moral Landscape relies on an assumed knowledge base and intuitions of its audience that cannot reasonably be expected of lay audiences; therefore, it cannot properly be construed as popular science communication. It nevertheless contains normative lessons for the broader science project, both in literary aspects to be salvaged and literary aspects and concepts to consciously be avoided and combated. I note that The Moral Landscape's failings can also be taken as an indication that typical descriptions of science communication offer under-detailed taxonomies of both audiences for science communication and the varieties of science communication aimed at those audiences. Future directions of study include rethinking appropriate target audiences for science literacy projects and developing a more discriminating taxonomy of both science communication and lay publics.
ContributorsJohnson, Nathan W (Author) / Robert, Jason S (Thesis advisor) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Martinez, Jacqueline (Committee member) / Sylvester, Edward (Committee member) / Lynch, John (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Once perceived as an unimportant occurrence in living organisms, cell degeneration was reconfigured as an important biological phenomenon in development, aging, health, and diseases in the twentieth century. This dissertation tells a twentieth-century history of scientific investigations on cell degeneration, including cell death and aging. By describing four central developments in cell degeneration research with the four major chapters, I trace the emergence of the degenerating cell as a scientific object, describe the generations of a variety of concepts, interpretations and usages associated with cell death and aging, and analyze the transforming influences of the rising cell degeneration research. Particularly, the four chapters show how the changing scientific practices about cellular life in embryology, cell culture, aging research, and molecular biology of Caenorhabditis elegans shaped the interpretations about cell degeneration in the twentieth-century as life-shaping, limit-setting, complex, yet regulated. These events created and consolidated important concepts in life sciences such as programmed cell death, the Hayflick limit, apoptosis, and death genes. These cases also transformed the material and epistemic practices about the end of cellular life subsequently and led to the formations of new research communities. The four cases together show the ways cell degeneration became a shared subject between molecular cell biology, developmental biology, gerontology, oncology, and pathology of degenerative diseases. These practices and perspectives created a special kind of interconnectivity between different fields and led to a level of interdisciplinarity within cell degeneration research by the early 1990s.
ContributorsJiang, Lijing (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Laubichler, Manfred (Thesis advisor) / Hurlbut, James (Committee member) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / White, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Systems biology studies complex biological systems. It is an interdisciplinary field, with biologists working with non-biologists such as computer scientists, engineers, chemists, and mathematicians to address research problems applying systems’ perspectives. How these different researchers and their disciplines differently contributed to the advancement of this field over time is a question worth examining. Did systems biology become a systems-oriented science or a biology-oriented science from 1992 to 2013?
This project utilized computational tools to analyze large data sets and interpreted the results from historical and philosophical perspectives. Tools deployed were derived from scientometrics, corpus linguistics, text-based analysis, network analysis, and GIS analysis to analyze more than 9000 articles (metadata and text) on systems biology. The application of these tools to a HPS project represents a novel approach.
The dissertation shows that systems biology has transitioned from a more mathematical, computational, and engineering-oriented discipline focusing on modeling to a more biology-oriented discipline that uses modeling as a means to address real biological problems. Also, the results show that bioengineering and medical research has increased within systems biology. This is reflected in the increase of the centrality of biology-related concepts such as cancer, over time. The dissertation also compares the development of systems biology in China with some other parts of the world, and reveals regional differences, such as a unique trajectory of systems biology in China related to a focus on traditional Chinese medicine.
This dissertation adds to the historiography of modern biology where few studies have focused on systems biology compared with the history of molecular biology and evolutionary biology.
This project utilized computational tools to analyze large data sets and interpreted the results from historical and philosophical perspectives. Tools deployed were derived from scientometrics, corpus linguistics, text-based analysis, network analysis, and GIS analysis to analyze more than 9000 articles (metadata and text) on systems biology. The application of these tools to a HPS project represents a novel approach.
The dissertation shows that systems biology has transitioned from a more mathematical, computational, and engineering-oriented discipline focusing on modeling to a more biology-oriented discipline that uses modeling as a means to address real biological problems. Also, the results show that bioengineering and medical research has increased within systems biology. This is reflected in the increase of the centrality of biology-related concepts such as cancer, over time. The dissertation also compares the development of systems biology in China with some other parts of the world, and reveals regional differences, such as a unique trajectory of systems biology in China related to a focus on traditional Chinese medicine.
This dissertation adds to the historiography of modern biology where few studies have focused on systems biology compared with the history of molecular biology and evolutionary biology.
ContributorsZou, Yawen (Author) / Laubichler, Manfred (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Newfeld, Stuart (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Biogeography places the geographical distribution of biodiversity in an evolutionary context. Ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), being a group of ubiquitous, ecologically dominant, and diverse insects, are useful model systems to understand the evolutionary origins and mechanisms of biogeographical patterns across spatial scales. On a global scale, ants have been used to test hypotheses on the origin and maintenance of the remarkably consistent latitudinal diversity gradient where biodiversity peaks in the equatorial tropics and decreases towards the poles. Additionally, ants have been used to posit and test theories of island biogeography such as the mechanisms of the species-area relationship, being the increase of biodiversity with cumulative land area. However, there are still unanswered questions about ant biogeography such as how specialized life histories contribute to their global biogeographical patterns. Furthermore, there remain island systems in the world’s biodiversity hotspots that harbor much less ant species than predicted by the species-area relationship, which potentially suggests a place ripe for discovery. In this dissertation, I use natural history, taxonomic, geographic, and phylogenetic data to study ant biodiversity and biogeography across spatial scales. First, I study the global biodiversity and biogeography of a specialized set of symbiotic interactions between ant species, here referred to as myrmecosymbioses, with an emphasis on social parasitism where one species exploits the parental care behavior and social colony environment of another species. In addition to characterizing a new myrmecosymbiosis, I use a global biogeographic and phylogenetic dataset to show that ant social parasitism is distributed along an inverse latitudinal diversity gradient where species richness and independent evolutionary origins of social parasitism peak within the northern hemisphere where the least free-living ant diversity exists. Second, I study the unexplored ant fauna of the Vanuatuan archipelago in the South Pacific. Using approximately 10,000 Vanuatuan ant specimens coupled with phylogenomics, I fill in a historical knowledge gap of South Pacific ant biogeography and demonstrate that the Vanuatuan ant fauna is a novel biodiversity hotspot. With these studies, I provide insights into how specialized life histories and unique island biotas shape the global distribution of biodiversity in different ways, especially in the ants.
ContributorsGray, Kyle William (Author) / Rabeling, Christian (Thesis advisor) / Martins, Emilia (Committee member) / Taylor, Jesse (Committee member) / Pratt, Stephen (Committee member) / Wojciechowski, Martin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Organisms regularly face the challenge of having to accumulate and allocate limited resources toward life-history traits. However, direct quantification of how resources are accumulated and allocated is rare. Carotenoids are among the best systems for investigating resource allocation, because they are diet-derived and multi-functional. Birds have been studied extensively with regard to carotenoid allocation towards life-history traits, but direct quantification of variation in carotenoid distribution on a whole-organism scale has yet to be done. Additionally, while we know that scavenger receptor B1 (SCARB1) is important for carotenoid absorption in birds, little is known about the factors that predict how SCARB1 is expressed in wild populations. For my dissertation, I first reviewed challenges associated with statistically analyzing tissue distributions of nutrients (nutrient profiles) and tested how tissue carotenoid distributions (carotenoid profiles) varied by sex, season, health state, and coloration in two bird species, house finches (Haemorhous mexicanus) and zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata). Then, I investigated the relationship between dietary carotenoid availability, relative expression of SCARB1, and extent of carotenoid-based coloration in a comparative study of wood-warblers (Parulidae). In my review of studies analyzing nutrient profiles, I found that multivariate analyses were the most common, but studies rarely reported intercorrelations among nutrient types. In house finches, all tissue carotenoid profiles varied by sex, season, and coloration. For example, males during autumn (molt) had higher concentrations of 3-hydroxyechinenone (the major red carotenoid in sexually attractive male feathers) in most but not all tissues compared to other season and sex combinations. However, the relationship between color and carotenoid profiles depended on the color metric. In zebra finches, only muscle and spleen carotenoid profiles varied between immune-challenged and control birds. In wood-warblers, I found that capacity to absorb carotenoids was positively correlated with the evolution of carotenoid-based coloration but negatively associated with liver carotenoid accumulation. Altogether, my dissertation illustrates (a) the context-dependence of tissue carotenoid profile variation, (b) that carotenoid-based integumentary coloration is a reflection of tissue carotenoid profiles, and (c) that digestive physiology (e.g., carotenoid absorption) is an important consideration in the study of diet and coloration in wild birds.
ContributorsWebb, Emily (Author) / McGraw, Kevin J (Thesis advisor) / Deviche, Pierre (Committee member) / Martins, Emilia (Committee member) / Sweazea, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Bisphenol-A or BPA is a common chemical pollutant that contaminates the environment, specifically water systems, due its mass production in human-made plastic
items and subsequent improper disposal. BPA is also an endocrine disruptor that has
negative health impacts on organisms exposed to them, ranging from changes in
reproduction to neural activity. In this study I researched the impact of early exposure to
weak levels of BPA on adult zebrafish (Danio rerio) social behavior. Zebrafish are highly
social creatures that rely on group living for protection and resource attainment in the
wild, meaning any alteration to how they interact with their conspecifics can be
detrimental to their survival. For one-week postfertilization, I exposed baby zebrafish to
either 0.01 mg/l BPA, 0.001 mg/l BPA, 0.1% DMSO, or water. I raised the fish to
adulthood and tested their reaction to a social stimulus. I found that early exposure to low
doses of Bisphenol-A led to an increase in zebrafish activity levels (increased distance
and time spent traveling) and a decrease in preference towards the social stimulus (more
time away from the social stimulus). Increases in activity suggest that the long-term
effects of early BPA exposure may be linked to chronic stress. However, all treatment
and control groups spent most of their time near the social stimulus when they had visual
access to it, implying a natural social drive that was not completely blocked by the
exposure to BPA. This also verifies that visual signals are highly important to social
behavior, since fish given olfactory access alone did not spend as much time in proximity
to the social stimulus. Although even short-term exposure to weak BPA has a lasting
impact on zebrafish social behavior, future studies are needed to confirm that these
persistent effects are related to stress.
ContributorsTufarelli, Alyssa (Author) / Martins, Emilia (Thesis advisor) / Suárez-Rodríguez, Monserrat (Committee member) / Conroy-Ben, Otakuye (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022