Establishment of Regional Herbarium Leads to More Than 200 New Flora Atlas Records for New York State

Loss of small herbaria is an unfortunate global trend, and initiation of new collections at small academic institutions is an increasingly rare occurrence. In 2006, a new herbarium was established at the State University of New York College at Plattsburgh. The PLAT herbarium has since grown to more than 7,000 specimens, many of them representative of the flora of northeastern New York (especially Clinton County). Previous to 2006, this region was without a recognized herbarium, the nearest in-state collections being more than 150 miles away. Although botanists have previously worked in the region, relatively few plant species were recorded for Clinton County by the New York Flora Atlas – a resource providing species distribution records based on specimens accessioned in herbarium collections. Given the dearth of available distribution data for Clinton County (including the eastern Adirondack Mountains and the western Lake Champlain valley), this project sought to provide records of previously unreported species by comparing NY Flora Atlas maps with current holdings. 203 species will now be added to the NY Flora Atlas for Clinton County, roughly half of those considered exotic. This exercise has amplified the importance of supporting and maintaining small regional herbaria as repositories of valuable biodiversity information. Likewise, this project also highlights the enduring value of training in floristics and taxonomy.

Subcellular Localization of the Non-Structural Proteins 3C and 3CD of the Honeybee Virus Deformed Wing Virus

Apis mellifera L., the European honeybee, is a crucial pollinator of many important agricultural crops in the United States. Recently, honeybee colonies have been affected by Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a disorder in which the colony fails due to the disappearance of a key functional group of worker bees. Though no direct causalrelationship has been confirmed, hives that experience CCD have been shown to have a high incidence of Deformed Wing Virus (DWV), a common honeybee virus. While the genome sequence and gene-order of DWV has been analyzed fairly recently, few other studies have been performed to understand the molecular characterization of the virus.Since little is known about where DWV proteins localize in infected host cells, the objective of this project was to determine the subcellular localization of two of the important non-structural proteins that are encoded in the DWV genome. This project focused on the protein 3C, an autocatalytic protease which cleaves itself from a longer polyprotein and helps to cut all of the other proteins apart from one another so that they can become functional, and 3D, the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) which is critical for replication of the virus because it copies the viral genome. By tagging nested constructs containing these two proteins and tracking where they localized in living cells, this study aimed to better understand the replication of DWV and to elicit possible targetsfor further research on how to control the virus. Since DWV is a picorna-like virus, distantly related to human viruses such as polio, and picornavirus non-structural proteins aggregate at cellular membranes during viral replication, the major hypothesis was that the 3C and 3CD proteins would localize at cellular organelle membranes as well. Using confocal microscopy, both proteins were found to localize in the cytoplasm, but the 3CDprotein was found to be mostly diffuse cytoplasmic, and the 3C protein was found to localize more specifically on membranous structures just outside of the nucleus.

Representations of the Human/ Nonhuman Primate Divide: the Influence of Science, Fiction, and Science-Fiction on the Concept of 'Being Human'

For as far back as human history can be traced, mankind has questioned what it means to be human. One of the most common approaches throughout Western culture's intellectual tradition in attempts to answering this question has been to compare humans with or against other animals. I argue that it was not until Charles Darwin's publication of The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) that Western culture was forced to seriously consider human identity in relation to the human/ nonhuman primate line. Since no thinker prior to Charles Darwin had caused such an identity crisis in Western thought, this interdisciplinary analysis of the history of how the human/ nonhuman primate line has been understood focuses on the reciprocal relationship of popular culture and scientific representations from 1871 to the Human Genome Consortium in 2000. Focusing on the concept coined as the "Darwin-Müller debate," representations of the human/ nonhuman primate line are traced through themes of language, intelligence, and claims of variation throughout the popular texts: Descent of Man, The Jungle Books (1894), Tarzan of the Apes (1914), and Planet of the Apes (1963). Additional themes such as the nature versus nurture debate and other comparative phenotypic attributes commonly used for comparison between man and apes are also analyzed. Such popular culture representations are compared with related or influential scientific research during the respective time period of each text to shed light on the reciprocal nature of Western intellectual tradition, popular notions of the human/ nonhuman primate line, and the development of the field of primatology. Ultimately this thesis shows that the Darwin-Müller debate is indeterminable, and such a lack of resolution makes man uncomfortable. Man's unsettled response and desire for self-knowledge further facilitates a continued search for answers to human identity. As the Human Genome Project has led to the rise of new debates, and primate research has become less anthropocentric over time, the mysteries of man's future have become more concerning than the questions of our past. The human/ nonhuman primate line is reduced to a 1% difference, and new debates have begun to overshadow the Darwin-Müller debate. In conclusion, I argue that human identity is best represented through the metaphor of evolution: both have an unknown beginning, both have an indeterminable future with no definite end, and like a species under the influence of evolution, what it means to be human is a constant, indeterminable process of change.