Faculty and Staff

High proportions of autistic children suffer from gastrointestinal (GI) disorders, implying a link between autism and abnormalities in gut microbial functions. Increasing evidence from recent high-throughput sequencing analyses indicates that disturbances in composition and diversity of gut microbiome are associated with various disease conditions. However, microbiome-level studies on autism are limited and mostly focused on pathogenic bacteria. Therefore, here we aimed to define systemic changes in gut microbiome associated with autism and autism-related GI problems. We recruited 20 neurotypical and 20 autistic children accompanied by a survey of both autistic severity and GI symptoms. By pyrosequencing the V2/V3 regions in bacterial 16S rDNA from fecal DNA samples, we compared gut microbiomes of GI symptom-free neurotypical children with those of autistic children mostly presenting GI symptoms. Unexpectedly, the presence of autistic symptoms, rather than the severity of GI symptoms, was associated with less diverse gut microbiomes. Further, rigorous statistical tests with multiple testing corrections showed significantly lower abundances of the genera Prevotella, Coprococcus, and unclassified Veillonellaceae in autistic samples. These are intriguingly versatile carbohydrate-degrading and/or fermenting bacteria, suggesting a potential influence of unusual diet patterns observed in autistic children. However, multivariate analyses showed that autism-related changes in both overall diversity and individual genus abundances were correlated with the presence of autistic symptoms but not with their diet patterns. Taken together, autism and accompanying GI symptoms were characterized by distinct and less diverse gut microbial compositions with lower levels of Prevotella, Coprococcus, and unclassified Veillonellaceae.

(Preprint.) Today's college and university learning landscapes are dynamic and
characterized by increased student demand for highly flexible and self-paced online learning opportunities. Recent fiscal conditions in higher education make learning landscape development more challenging due to finite resources and competing priorities. Similarly, academic libraries are experiencing substantial budget and staff reductions. Despite these trends, academic libraries are in a strong position to contribute to surrounding learning landscapes by expanding student online learning opportunities and promoting the critical use of information. Evolving learning technologies available for free or at low cost provide higher education and libraries with the tools to respond to this fluid environment.

Leveraging Drupal for your business:
Use Drupal to power your business -- hear case studies and learn about adapting to open-source technology.

Libraries are growing into new joint entities -- the library as a place, and the library as a resource. Library websites serve as a resource, delivering tools for learning to patrons and students in an academic setting. Drupal is an ideal tool for facilitating the specialized tasks that many library developers have to complete.

In this session, attendees will learn about:
       1. Using the built-in architecture of Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 to meet the goals of library 
           websites.
       2. The 10 best modules for library websites.
       3. 10 recommended theming techniques for common library interfaces.
       4. New expectations of library websites as gathered from user surveys and usability
           studies.
       5. Example set-ups of Drupal sites for common library settings and staff organizations.
       6. Successful case studies of major library websites run on Drupal.
       7. Tips for useful library-specific usability studies with library users and students.

Attendees will come away from this session with a firm understanding of quality library sites as tools, and what many users are growing to expect. They will also learn how to set up a Drupal website for a library, and successful ways to meet the specific resource needs of their organizations.

The archived event website can be accessed here.

We present a microarray nonlinear calibration (MiNC) method for quantifying antibody binding to the surface of protein microarrays that significantly increases the linear dynamic range and reduces assay variation compared with traditional approaches. A serological analysis of guinea pig Mycobacterium tuberculosis models showed that a larger number of putative antigen targets were identified with MiNC, which is consistent with the improved assay performance of protein microarrays. MiNC has the potential to be employed in biomedical research using multiplex antibody assays that need quantitation, including the discovery of antibody biomarkers, clinical diagnostics with multi-antibody signatures, and construction of immune mathematical models.

Throughout the long history of virus-host co-evolution, viruses have developed delicate strategies to facilitate their invasion and replication of their genome, while silencing the host immune responses through various mechanisms. The systematic characterization of viral protein-host interactions would yield invaluable information in the understanding of viral invasion/evasion, diagnosis and therapeutic treatment of a viral infection, and mechanisms of host biology. With more than 2,000 viral genomes sequenced, only a small percent of them are well investigated. The access of these viral open reading frames (ORFs) in a flexible cloning format would greatly facilitate both in vitro and in vivo virus-host interaction studies. However, the overall progress of viral ORF cloning has been slow. To facilitate viral studies, we are releasing the initiation of our panviral proteome collection of 2,035 ORF clones from 830 viral genes in the Gateway® recombinational cloning system. Here, we demonstrate several uses of our viral collection including highly efficient production of viral proteins using human cell-free expression system in vitro, global identification of host targets for rubella virus using Nucleic Acid Programmable Protein Arrays (NAPPA) containing 10,000 unique human proteins, and detection of host serological responses using micro-fluidic multiplexed immunoassays. The studies presented here begin to elucidate host-viral protein interactions with our systemic utilization of viral ORFs, high-throughput cloning, and proteomic technologies. These valuable plasmid resources will be available to the research community to enable continued viral functional studies.