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The goal of this project was to design and create a genetic construct that would allow for <br/>tumor growth to be induced in the center of the wing imaginal disc of Drosophila larvae, the <br/>R85E08 domain, using a heat shock. The resulting transgene would be combined with other <br/>transgenes in a single fly that would allow for simultaneous expression of the oncogene and, in <br/>the surrounding cells, other genes of interest. This system would help establish Drosophila as a <br/>more versatile and reliable model organism for cancer research. Furthermore, pilot studies were <br/>performed, using elements of the final proposed system, to determine if tumor growth is possible <br/>in the center of the disc, which oncogene produces the best results, and if oncogene expression <br/>induced later in development causes tumor growth. Three different candidate genes were <br/>investigated: RasV12, PvrACT, and Avli.
ContributorsSt Peter, John Daniel (Author) / Harris, Rob (Thesis director) / Varsani, Arvind (Committee member) / School of Molecular Sciences (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
When examining the medical doctrines of previous empires, they reveal the influence of religion, societal attitudes, and the historical context that influenced the scholars that penned them. The advancements during the Islamic Golden age can be seen in the field of medicine, which had the Greco-Roman medical corpus as their foundation and the source of the theory of the four humors and anatomical beliefs. This paper will analyze the effect of cultural, societal, and historical influences on the medical doctrines of Muslim medieval physicians in the Golden Age and the works of the Roman physician Galen, and demonstrate how these effects result in similarities and differences in medical practice and the understanding of disease and anatomy. Due to translation efforts that were supported by religious views on the accumulation of knowledge and the efforts of the Abbasid empire, resultant acceptance of the theory of the four humors and anatomical doctrines is observed in the treatment and perception of disease, which would consist of this paper's focus on surgery, diet therapy and associations with nature. However, with further analysis of the extent of this acceptance and the findings in the Islamic medical doctrines, the differences in experimental methods, religious interpretations, and cultural attitudes shows a deviation from the Galenic tradition, with the second set of the paper's focus being human dissection, cause of disease, and experimentation. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the impact of religion, societal attitudes, culture and the accepted paradigm on the practice of medicine and the study of anatomy, and what would cause a challenge against the legacy of Galen.
ContributorsAlzuhairi, Fatemah Saad (Author) / Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos (Thesis director) / Smith, Brian (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Sch (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
Honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies have experienced substantial losses due to colony collapse disorder (CCD) since the first officially reported cases in 2006. Many factors have been implicated in CCD, including pests, pathogens, malnutrition, and pesticide use, but no correlation has been found between a single factor and the occurrence of CCD. Fungicides have received less research attention compared to insecticides, despite the fact that fungicide application coincides with bloom and the presence of bees. Pristine fungicide is widely used in agriculture and is commonly found as a residue in hives. Several studies have concluded that Pristine can be used without harming bees, but reports of brood loss following Pristine application continue to surface across the country. The primary objectives of this study were to determine whether Pristine causes an aversive gustatory response in bees and whether consumption of an acute dose affects responsiveness to sucrose. An awareness of how foragers interact with contaminated food is useful to understand the likelihood that Pristine is ingested and how that may affect bees' ability to evaluate floral resources. Our results indicated that Pristine has no significant effect on gustatory response or sucrose responsiveness. There was no significant difference between bee responses to Pristine contaminated sucrose and sucrose alone, and no significant effect of Pristine on sucrose responsiveness. These results indicate that honey bees do not have a gustatory aversion to Pristine. A lack of aversion means that honey bees will continue collecting contaminated resources and dispersing them throughout the colony where it can affect brood and clean food stores.
ContributorsMcHugh, Cora Elizabeth (Co-author) / Jernigan, Christopher (Co-author, Committee member) / Burden, Christina (Co-author) / DeGrandi-Hoffman, Gloria (Co-author) / Smith, Brian (Thesis director) / Fewell, Jennifer (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This study illustrates the abilities of the honeybee, Apis mellifera, to learn and differentiate between patterns solely off their spatial frequencies. Patterns were chosen based off of calculations derived from the measurements of the physical construction of the apposition compound eye, which led to predictions of what the bees could theoretically see. The hypothesis was then that bees would have a visual threshold where patterns with spatial frequencies that fall below this line should be easily distinguishable, and patterns above the threshold would have scores that mimic if the bees made choices randomly. There were 9 patterns tested, all with different spatial frequencies and in the colors of black, white, and gray. The bees were tested on their learning and pattern differentiation abilities with 10 pattern comparisons, with the lower frequency of the two being associated with an unscented sucrose solution reward. The results were surprising in that the previous studies pointing towards this visual threshold were inaccurate because of some of the patterns being learning in an intermediate ability. These intermediate scores suggest that the calculations predicting what the bees could see clearly were slightly wrong because it was more likely that the bees saw those images in more of a blur, which resulted in their intermediate score. Honeybees have served as a useful model organisms over the decades with studying learning involving visual information. This study lacked in its total numbers of trials and bees tested, which could have led to incomplete results, and this showing of an intermediate score and ability. Future studies should continue in order to advance this understanding of a perceptually and cognitively advance processing animal.
ContributorsBalsino, Brandon Bartholomew (Author) / Harrison, Jon (Thesis director) / Smith, Brian (Committee member) / Duell, Meghan (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
Selenium, a group 16 metalloid on the periodic table, is a necessary mineral for many organisms. Trace amounts of selenium are essential for normal development, antioxidant protein function, enzyme function, and hormone regulation (Burden et al., 2016). However, when selenium is found in toxic amounts in organisms, it has been found to substitute for sulfur in proteins, which can be toxic to these animals, and cause oxidative stress (Quinn et al., 2007). Using the previous research done with acute exposure to organic and inorganic selenium compounds, we hypothesized that the inorganic sodium selenate would significantly decrease learning and memory recall for both chronic and acute exposure. We also hypothesized that the consumption of organic methylseleno-L-cysteine by honey bees would decrease learning and memory recall for both the chronic and acute exposure. We further hypothesized that protein carbonyl content would be increased due to oxidative damage caused by selenium in both the sodium selenate and the methylseleno-L-cysteine treatment groups, but that the inorganic selenium compound would increase the carbonyl content more than the methylseleno-L-cysteine. To run the experiments, three tents outside had two colonies in each tent. One tent contained the sodium selenate group, another had the sucrose control, and one contained the methylseleno-L-cysteine group. The treatment groups were fed selenium in their sucrose feeders. The first part of the experiment was training the bees by using proboscis extension response (PER) to teach them to extend their proboscis to the rewarded odor and not to the unrewarded odor. This was done by pairing the rewarded odor with a sucrose reward and not pairing it with the unrewarded odor. Then their short-term and long-term memory recall was tested. The second part of the experiment was checking for oxidative damage by measuring the protein carbonyl content in the bees. Three boxes were set up with the same three treatment groups as used in the tents. The treatment group bees were exposed to selenium in the sucrose feeders and in the pollen patties. After one week, the living bees were removed and frozen. They were then homogenized to extract protein. The first assay run was the protein content assay to establish a standard protein concentration for samples. Then a protein carbonyl assay was run, to determine the protein carbonyl content. Overall, the experiment found that exposure to selenium negatively impacted honey bees learning and memory recall significantly. Chronic exposure to the inorganic selenate reduced the bees' long-term memory abilities to differentiate between odors. With methylseleno-L-cysteine, it had no significant effect for the chronic exposure, but for the acute exposure, it had a significant impairment on their abilities to distinguish between the rewarded and unrewarded odors during conditioning. Our results showed that from our experiment there appeared to be no significant effect of selenium exposure on the increase of carbonylation content in the different treatment groups. This is most likely due to the fact the carbonyl content was not detectable because the protein concentration was low in the samples (approximately 3.5 mg/mL).
ContributorsWinski, Alexandra (Co-author) / Winski, Brandon (Co-author) / Smith, Brian (Thesis director) / Harrison, Jon (Committee member) / Burden, Christina (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Cuticular hydrocarbons (CHCs) play a crucial role in social insect recognition systems. In this study we investigated mate choice in the red harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex barbatus. In Phoenix, this species has two lineages, J1 and J2, which look identical, but are genetically isolated. In the genetic caste determination (GCD) system workers and queens are determined by their genotype (i.e., workers develop from interlineage crosses, queens from intralineage crosses). As such, J1 and J2 lineages are dependent on each other in order for colonies to produce both workers and reproductive queens. Given their genetic isolation and interdependence, we hypothesized that the CHCs of alate males and queens are affected by lineage, and that differences in the CHC profile are used for mate recognition. We tested these hypotheses by analyzing the lineage distributions of actively mating pairs (n=65), and compared them with the overall distribution of male and female sexuals (n=180). We additionally analyzed the five most abundant CHC compounds for 20 of the actively mating P. barbatus alate male and queen pairs to determine how variable the two lineages are between each sex. We found that mating pair distributions did not significantly differ from those expected under a random mating system (�2= 1.4349, P= 0.6973), however, CHC profiles did differ between J1 and J2 lineages and sexes for the five most abundant CHC compounds. Our results show that random mating is taking place in this population, however given the differences observed in CHC profiles, mate recognition could be taking place.
ContributorsTula Del Moral Testai, Pedro Rafael (Co-author) / Cash, Elizabeth (Co-author) / Gadau, Juergen (Thesis director) / Liebig, Juergen (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
I tested the hypothesis that in mature colonies of the seed harvester Pogonomyrmex californicus ant species, paired pleometrotic queens would produce workers more efficiently after a massive removal of their work force than haplometrotic queens, paired pleometrotic with haplometrotic queens, and single pleometrotic queens. I suggested that the paired pleometrotic queens would have an advantage of cooperating together in reproducing more workers quicker than the other conditions to make up for the lost workers. This would demonstrate a benefit that pleometrosis has over haplometrosis for mature colonies, which would explain why pleometrosis continues for P.californicus after colony foundation. After removing all but twenty workers for every colony, I took pictures and counted the emerging brood for 52 days. Analyses showed that the paired pleometrotic queens and the haplometrotic queens both grew at an equally efficient rate and the paired pleometrotic and haplometrotic queens growing the least efficiently. However, the results were not significant and did not support the hypothesis that paired pleometrotic queens recover from worker loss more proficiently than other social systems.
ContributorsFernandez, Marisa Raquel (Author) / Fewell, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Gadau, Juergen (Committee member) / Haney, Brian (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Wolbachia is a genus of obligately intracellular bacterial endosymbionts of arthropods and nematodes, infecting up to 66% of all such species. In order to ensure its transmission, it may modify host reproduction by inducing one of four phenotypes: cytoplasmic incompatibility, feminization of genetic males, killing of male embryos, and induction of thelytokous parthenogenesis. This investigation was a characterization of the so-far unexamined Wolbachia infection of Pogonomyrmex ants. Five main questions were addressed: whether Wolbachia infection rates vary between North and South America, whether infection rates are dependent on host range, whether Wolbachia affects the caste determination of P. barbatus, whether infection rates in Pogonomyrmex are similar to those of other ants, and whether Wolbachia phylogeny parallels the phylogeny of its Pogonomyrmex hosts. Using PCR amplification of the wsp, ftsZ, and gatB loci, Wolbachia infections were detected in four of fifteen Pogonomyrmex species (26.7%), providing the first known evidence of Wolbachia infection in this genus. All infected species were from South America, specifically Argentina. Therefore, Wolbachia has no role in the caste determination of the North American species P. barbatus. Additionally, while it appears that the incidence of Wolbachia in Pogonomyrmex may be limited to South America, host range did not correlate with infection status. The incidence of Wolbachia in Pogonomyrmex as a whole was similar to that of invasive Solenopsis and Linepithema species, but not to Wasmannia auropunctata or Anoplolepis gracilipes, which retain Wolbachia infection in non-native locations. This suggests that there may be a parallel in Wolbachia infection spread in certain short-term models of species colonization and long-term models of genus radiation. Finally, there was no congruity between host and parasite phylogeny according to maximum likelihood analyses, necessarily due to horizontal transfer of Wolbachia between hosts and lateral gene transfer between Wolbachia strains within hosts.
ContributorsHarris, Alexandre Marm (Author) / Gadau, Juergen (Thesis director) / Martin, Thomas (Committee member) / Helmkampf, Martin Erik (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Members of the Delphinidae family are widely distributed across the world’s oceans. We used a viral metagenomic approach to identify viruses in orca (Orcinus orca) and short-finned pilot whale (Globicephala macrorhynchus) muscle, kidney, and liver samples from deceased animals. From orca tissue samples (muscle, kidney, and liver), we identified a novel polyomavirus (Polyomaviridae), three cressdnaviruses, and two genomoviruses (Genomoviridae). In the short-finned pilot whale we were able to identify one genomovirus in a kidney sample. The presence of unclassified cressdnavirus within two samples (muscle and kidney) of the same animal supports the possibility these viruses might be widespread within the animal. The orca polyomavirus identified here is the first of its species and is not closely related to the only other dolphin polyomavirus previously discovered. The identification and verification of these viruses expands the current knowledge of viruses that are associated with the Delphinidae family.
ContributorsSmith, Kendal Ryan (Author) / Varsani, Arvind (Thesis director) / Kraberger, Simona (Committee member) / Dolby, Greer (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
Phage therapy has been around for more than a century, but has regained interest in the field of medicine and holds significant potential to act as a treatment against a deadly bacterial infection in various cactus species. It was discovered that bacteriophages isolated from soil samples of potato plants were able to suppress Pectobacterium carotovorum, ‘Pectobacterium’ being within the family Pectobacteriaceae which contains the ‘Erwinia’ genus that causes soft rot diseases in various plants (Jones, 2012). The two scientists had co-inoculated “... the phage with the phytobacterium” (Jones, 2012) in order to suppress the growth and prevent the infection from occurring.
ContributorsFry, Danielle Elizabeth (Author) / Geiler-Samerotte, Kerry (Thesis director) / Pfeifer, Susanne (Committee member) / Varsani, Arvind (Committee member) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05