Lyme disease is a common tick-borne illness caused by the Gram-negative bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. An outer membrane protein of Borrelia burgdorferi, P66, has been suggested as a possible target for Lyme disease treatments. However, a lack of structural information available for P66 has hindered attempts to design medications to target the protein. Therefore, this study attempted to find methods for expressing and purifying P66 in quantities that can be used for structural studies. It was found that by using the PelB signal sequence, His-tagged P66 could be directed to the outer membrane of Escherichia coli, as confirmed by an anti-His Western blot. Further attempts to optimize P66 expression in the outer membrane were made, pending verification via Western blotting. The ability to direct P66 to the outer membrane using the PelB signal sequence is a promising first step in determining the overall structure of P66, but further work is needed before P66 is ready for large-scale purification for structural studies.
Due to what is known as the “biologically desert fallacy” and the pervasive westernized ideal of wilderness that has influenced widespread American Conservation culture for millennia, urban areas have long been deemed as areas devoid of biodiversity. However, cities can contribute significantly to regional biodiversity and provide vital niches for wildlife, illuminating the growing awareness that cities are crucial to the future of conservation and combating the global biodiversity crisis. In terms of the biodiversity crisis, bats are a relevant species of concern. In many studies, different bat species have been broadly classified according to their ability to adapt to urban environments. There is evidence that urban areas can filter bat species based on traits and behavior, with many bats possessing traits that do not allow them to live in cities. The three broad categories are urban avoiders, urban adapters, or urban exploiters based upon where their abundance is highest along a gradient of urban intensity. A common example of an urban exploiter bat is a Mexican Free-tailed bat, which can thrive and rely on urban environments and it is found in the Phoenix Metropolitan area. Bats are important as even in urban environments they play vital ecological roles such as cactus pollination, insect management, and seed dispersal. Bat Crazy is a thesis project focused on urban enhancement and the field of urban biodiversity. The goals of this thesis are to observe how bio-conscious urban cities that work to promote species conservation can serve as a positive tool to promote biodiversity and foster community education and engagement for their urban environment.
Sulfur oxidation is a process that is seen a wide variety of places. One particular place is Yellowstone national park where an abundance of hot springs are present. These acidic and hot places are prime locations for sulfur oxidation to occur. At a very basic level this is thought of as Sulfur, oxygen, and water forming sulfate and hydrogen. Many other reactions occur when an organism performs these processes, and many enzymes are used for this. This paper aimed to create, balance, and analyze the reactions involved in the paper Sulfur Oxidation in the Acidophilic Autotrophic Acidithiobacillus spp. (Wang et al., 2019) Once these reactions were balanced thermodynamic properties were found to evaluate the Gibbs Free Energy of these reactions. This allowed for a unique energy-based view of how this web of reactions relate to each other.
Early detection of disease is essential for alleviating disease burden, increasing success rate and decreasing mortality rate especially for cancer. To improve disease diagnostics, many candidate biomarkers have been suggested using molecular biology or image analysis techniques over the past decade. The receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve is a standard technique to evaluate a diagnostic accuracy of biomarkers, but it has some limitations especially for heterogeneous diseases. As an alternative of the ROC curve analysis, we suggest a jittered dot plot (JDP) and JDP-based evaluation measures, above mean difference (AMD) and averaged above mean difference (AAMD). We demonstrate how JDP and AMD or AAMD together better evaluate biomarkers than the standard ROC curve. We analyze real and heterogeneous basal-like breast cancer data.
In order to further compare porcine and human-derived enzymes, a determination of the enzyme effectiveness was done via digestion simulation. The digestion for both the human and porcine-derived enzymes consisted of three steps: oral, gastric, and intestinal. After the digestion, the absorbance for each enzyme class as well as a dilution curve of the formula used was read and recorded. Using the standard dilution curve and the absorbance values for each unknown, the formula and thus enzyme concentration that was lost through the reaction was able to be calculated.
The effectiveness of both the human and porcine enzymes, determined by the percent of formula lost, was 18.2% and 19.7%, respectively, with an error of 0.6% from the spectrophotometer, and an error of about 10% from the scale used for measuring the enzymes. This error was likely due to the small mass required of the enzymes and can be prevented in the future by performing the experiment at a larger scale.