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- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
Latino migrant youth (LMY) migrate to the United States (U.S.) with the hopes to find work to support their families in their countries of origin. However, their young age and precarious documentation status limit the kinds of jobs they can take on while living in the U.S. Although agriculture is one of the most hazardous industries in the U.S., LMY can be found performing agricultural work and confronting a myriad of risks such as physical injuries from machinery, mental health risks, and exposure to chemical hazards. This literature review tackles the concept of pesticide exposure among Latino migrant youth in U.S. agriculture.
A unique geometry is presented that creates biaxial stresses and strains when subjected to uniaxial loading in order to facilitate further multiaxial fatigue research by reducing the need for the use of specialized multiaxial loading equipment. Cyclic plasticity is a critical process in fatigue and the geometry was successfully designed and fabricated to allow for the continuous monitoring of cyclic plastic strains of magnitude 10^(-4) mm/mm during cyclic loading. Simulation results show that plasticity occurs in a region central to the test specimen while also being subjected to biaxial stresses and strains characterized by average principal direction ratios of 1.18 and 1.39 respectively. Simulation shows fatigue life of the specimen to be 79 thousand cycles, which allows for a reasonable evolution of cyclic plasticity before reaching failure. Issues with the instrumentation process hindered experimental validation of the simulation results.
The symbiosis between termites and their parabasalid hindgut protists centers around the wood digestion that is needed for both species to acquire the nutrients from wood. One of the important carbohydrate-active proteins required for the wood breakdown are glycoside hydrolase (GH) families. Previous studies have looked at the phylogeny of some of these protein families from a termite whole gut transcriptome or in a different context than lignocellulose digestion. In this study, we attempt to understand the function and evolution of these GH families in the context of protist evolution by using protist single cell transcriptomes. 14 families of interest were chosen to create phylogenetic trees: GH2, GH3, GH5, GH7, GH8, GH9, GH10, GH11, GH26, GH43, GH45, GH55, GH67, GH95 for their interesting expressions across different protists such as being present in all protists or being present in only termite-associated protists. The dbCAN2 (automated Carbohydrate-active enzyme ANnotation) program was used to find GH families in each of the protist single cell transcriptomes and additional characterized sequences registered on the National Center for Biotechnology Information to create phylogenetic trees for each of the GH families of interest. Results show that many of the GH families expressed in protists were acquired through horizontal gene transfer from fungi and bacteria. Additionally, comparison to the parabasalid phylogeny indicates most GH families evolved independently from the protists. Based on the pattern of expression of these GH families throughout different protist orders, conclusions can be made about whether the specific family was vertically or horizontally acquired in the termite symbionts.
Nonsense mediated decay is a pathway that selectively degrades mRNAs that contain premature termination codons (PTCs). The purpose of this study is to research the evolution of NMD in Parabasalia and infer whether they have a normal, functioning nonsense-mediated decay pathway. Parabasalia are single-celled, flagellated protists that have undergone evolutionary transitions as they become obligate symbionts of termites. The key proteins involved in nonsense-mediated decay, ATM, ATR, UPF1, SMG1, UPF2, UPF3A, UPF3B, were researched and used in order to build phylogenetic trees to analyze what other species of eukaryotes have these same genes and where they branch relative to the nonsense mediated decay proteins present in Parabasalia. The main question being asked in this research is if Parabasalia have enough of the main nonsense mediated decay proteins to have a functional nonsense-mediated decay process and if not, which proteins have been lost over evolutionary history. To carry out this research, phylogenic trees were built using transcriptomes from many different types of eukaryotes that contained the main proteins involved in the nonsense-mediated decay pathway. These transcriptomes were taken from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database using the BLAST algorithm, trimmed using TrimAl, aligned by utilizing AliView which utilizes Muscle. Sequoia was then used to remove redundant species from the trees, and IQ-TREE was used to form the phylogenic trees. This process was repeated four times to create well-rounded trees with various eukaryotic species present. The results of this research found that ATM, ATR, UPF1, SMG1, and UPF2 are present in Parabasalia as well as across many eukaryotic groups, whereas UPF3A and UPF3B were not found in many of the eukaryotes researched. This points to Parabasalia having a normal and functioning nonsense-mediated decay pathway as they have the majority of the essential proteins needed for a functional pathway.
This research paper focuses on how the idea of suffering has evolved over time in the United States healthcare system. Different aspects like long vs short-term illnesses, bias, and more were inspected to determine how they play a part in increased or decreased patient suffering. The final determination of how suffering in the system has evolved and what to do with this information is also discussed.