Faculty and Staff

In 2014/2015, Arizona State University (ASU) Libraries, the Labriola National American Indian Data Center, and the ASU American Indian Studies Department completed an ASU Institute for Humanities Research (IHR) seed grant entitled “Carlos Montezuma’s Wassaja Newsletter: Digitization, Access and Context” to digitize all ASU held issues of the newsletter Wassaja Freedom’s Signal for the Indian, which Yavapai activist-intellectual Carlos Montezuma, MD (1866-1923) self-published during 1916-1922. The grant team additionally selected a portion of the ASU Libraries Carlos Montezuma archival collection for digitization to provide a more complete picture of Dr. Carlos Montezuma’s life and work.

The ASU grant team produced a searchable online collection on the ASU Digital Repository and created an online exhibition in conjunction with the IHR Nexus Lab’s Developing Wassaja Project. The Nexus Lab’s role at ASU is to grow the digital humanities through interdisciplinary collaborations bringing together humanities, science, and technology. The Nexus Lab partnered with the grant team to create the Developing Wassaja Project which provided an opportunity for faculty, staff, and students at ASU to engage in electronic publication through web application development.

The resulting web platform, Wassaja: A Carlos Montezuma Project, provides context for this digitized collection and facilitates community interaction, including a partnership with Dr. Montezuma’s home community the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation. In this webcast, Digital Projects Librarian Matthew Harp, Developing Wassaja Project team member Joe Buenker (subject librarian), and grant team member Joyce Martin (librarian and curator of the Labriola National American Indian Data Center) will discuss and demonstrate the resources created and the resulting partnership with the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation. The webcast will focus on identifying collaborators and needed skills to engage in Digital Humanities research and on identifying the stages of a collaborative project.

Participants will gain insight on working directly with diverse communities; overcoming technical limitations of traditional institutional repositories; collaborative strategies with faculty, research centers, and cultural heritage societies; solutions for moving hidden collections into an engaging digital exhibition; integrating digital humanities research and instruction with library curation; and preparing for long term costs and management issues.

Anthropology librarian Juliann Couture and Joyce Martin, curator of the Labriola National American Indian Data Center, looking at the Center's display of unique Hopi Kachina dolls. Four of the kachinas (Navan Kachina; Talavi Kachina; Flute Kachina; and Ahöla Kachina) were created by artist, carver, and former ASU employee Tony Dukepoo as a gift to the libraries in 1979. The kachina dolls are on display in the Labriola Center located on the 2nd floor of the Hayden Library on ASU's Tempe campus.

The Simon Ortiz and Labriola Center Lecture on Indigenous Land, Culture, and Community addresses topics and issues across disciplines in the arts, humanities, sciences, and politics. Underscoring Indigenous American experiences and perspectives, this Series seeks to create and celebrate knowledge that evolves from an Indigenous worldview that is inclusive and that is applicable to all walks of life.” Professor Simon Ortiz discussed the overall nature of the Series, especially emphasizing the global nature of Indigenous concerns. Joyce Martin and Matthew Harp elaborated on the contributions of the Labriola National American Indian Data Center and ASU Libraries to the Series.

The Labriola Center hosts an informal event in Hayden Library which facilitates close interaction between the featured speaker and audience members. The ASU Libraries records the evening lectures which take place at the Heard Museum and presents both an audio podcast and streaming video of each lecture on the ASU Library Channel webpage. This lecture series provides not only a chance for community discussion at the events themselves, but through the innovative use of technology the ASU Libraries enables additional forums for discussion in blogs and web pages which choose to link to the streaming videos.

The low pH of the stomach serves as a barrier to ingested microbes and must be overcome or bypassed when delivering live bacteria for vaccine or probiotic applications. Typically, the impact of stomach acidity on bacterial survival is evaluated in vitro, as there are no small animal models to evaluate these effects in vivo. To better understand the effect of this low pH barrier to live attenuated Salmonella vaccines, which are often very sensitive to low pH, we investigated the value of the histamine mouse model for this application. A low pH gastric compartment was transiently induced in mice by the injection of histamine. This resulted in a gastric compartment of approximately pH 1.5 that was capable of distinguishing between acid-sensitive and acid-resistant microbes. Survival of enteric microbes during gastric transit in this model directly correlated with their in vitro acid resistance. Because many Salmonella enterica serotype Typhi vaccine strains are sensitive to acid, we have been investigating systems to enhance the acid resistance of these bacteria. Using the histamine mouse model, we demonstrate that the in vivo survival of S. Typhi vaccine strains increased approximately 10-fold when they carried a sugar-inducible arginine decarboxylase system. We conclude that this model will be a useful for evaluating live bacterial preparations prior to clinical trials.

Leucine-responsive regulatory protein (Lrp) is known to be an indirect activator of type 1 fimbriae synthesis in Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium via direct regulation of FimZ, a direct positive regulator for type 1 fimbriae production. Using RT-PCR, we have shown previously that fimA transcription is dramatically impaired in both lrp-deletion (Δlrp) and constitutive-lrp expression (lrp^C) mutant strains. In this work, we used chromosomal P_fimA-lacZ fusions and yeast agglutination assays to confirm and extend our previous results. Direct binding of Lrp to P_fimA was shown by an electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA) and DNA footprinting assay. Site-directed mutagenesis revealed that the Lrp-binding motifs in P_fimA play a role in both activation and repression of type 1 fimbriae production. Overproduction of Lrp also abrogates fimZ expression. EMSA data showed that Lrp and FimZ proteins independently bind to P_fimA without competitive exclusion. In addition, both Lrp and FimZ binding to P_fimA caused a hyper retardation (supershift) of the DNA-protein complex compared to the shift when each protein was present alone. Nutrition-dependent cellular Lrp levels closely correlated with the amount of type 1 fimbriae production. These observations suggest that Lrp plays important roles in type 1 fimbriation by acting as both a positive and negative regulator and its effect depends, at least in part, on the cellular concentration of Lrp in response to the nutritional environment.

Researchers have iterated that the future of synthetic biology and biotechnology lies in novel consumer applications of crossing biology with engineering. However, if the new biology's future is to be sustainable, early and serious efforts must be made towards social sustainability. Therefore, the crux of new applications of synthetic biology and biotechnology is public understanding and acceptance. The RASVaccine is a novel recombinant design not found in nature that re-engineers a common bacteria ( Salmonella) to produce a strong immune response in humans. Synthesis of the RASVaccine has the potential to improve public health as an inexpensive, non-injectable product. But how can scientists move forward to create a dialogue of creating a 'common sense' of this new technology in order to promote social sustainability? This paper delves into public issues raised around these novel technologies and uses the RASVaccine as an example of meeting the public with a common sense of its possibilities and limitations.

Background: Salmonella has been employed to deliver therapeutic molecules against cancer and infectious diseases. As the carrier for target gene(s), the cargo plasmid should be stable in the bacterial vector. Plasmid recombination has been reduced in E. coli by mutating several genes including the recA, recE, recF and recJ. However, to our knowledge, there have been no published studies of the effect of these or any other genes that play a role in plasmid recombination in Salmonella enterica.

Results: The effect of recA, recF and recJ deletions on DNA recombination was examined in three serotypes of Salmonella enterica. We found that (1) intraplasmid recombination between direct duplications was RecF-independent in Typhimurium and Paratyphi A, but could be significantly reduced in Typhi by a ΔrecA or ΔrecF mutation; (2) in all three Salmonella serotypes, both ΔrecA and ΔrecF mutations reduced intraplasmid recombination when a 1041 bp intervening sequence was present between the duplications; (3) ΔrecA and ΔrecF mutations resulted in lower frequencies of interplasmid recombination in Typhimurium and Paratyphi A, but not in Typhi; (4) in some cases, a ΔrecJ mutation could reduce plasmid recombination but was less effective than ΔrecA and ΔrecF mutations. We also examined chromosome-related recombination. The frequencies of intrachromosomal recombination and plasmid integration into the chromosome were 2 and 3 logs lower than plasmid recombination frequencies in Rec[superscript +] strains. A ΔrecA mutation reduced both intrachromosomal recombination and plasmid integration frequencies.

Conclusions: The ΔrecA and ΔrecF mutations can reduce plasmid recombination frequencies in Salmonella enterica, but the effect can vary between serovars. This information will be useful for developing Salmonella delivery vectors able to stably maintain plasmid cargoes for vaccine development and gene therapy.

Background: To be effective, orally administered live Salmonella vaccines must first survive their encounter with the low pH environment of the stomach. To enhance survival, an antacid is often given to neutralize the acidic environment of the stomach just prior to or concomitant with administration of the vaccine. One drawback of this approach, from the perspective of the clinical trial volunteer, is that the taste of a bicarbonate-based acid neutralization system can be unpleasant. Thus, we explored an alternative method that would be at least as effective as bicarbonate and with a potentially more acceptable taste. Because ingestion of protein can rapidly buffer stomach pH, we examined the possibility that the protein-rich Ensure® Nutrition shakes would be effective alternatives to bicarbonate.

Results: We tested one Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium and three Salmonella Typhi vaccine strains and found that all strains survived equally well when incubated in either Ensure® or bicarbonate. In a low gastric pH mouse model, Ensure® worked as well or better than bicarbonate to enhance survival through the intestinal tract, although neither agent enhanced the survival of the S. Typhi test strain possessing a rpoS mutation.

Conclusions: Our data show that a protein-rich drink such as Ensure® Nutrition shakes can serve as an alternative to bicarbonate for reducing gastric pH prior to administration of a live Salmonella vaccine.