Sue Foster, U-M women's cross country coach

[cropped from team photo]

Methylomic and Transcriptomic Insights Linking Air Pollution and Atherosclerosis

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Interrogation of a sonogashira cross-coupling of 8-bromoguanosine with phenylacetylene on amberlite:evidence for Pd/Cu ion binding and propagation of Pd/Cu nanoparticles

The reactivity of Amberlite (IRA-67) base "heterogeneous" resin in Sonogashira cross-coupling of 8-bromoguanosine 1 with phenylacetylene 3 to give 2 has been examined. Both 1 and 2 coordinate to Pd and Cu ions, which explains why at equivalent catalyst loadings, the homogeneous reaction employing triethylamine base is poor yielding. X-ray photo-electron spectroscopy (XPS) has been used to probe and quantify the active nitrogen base sites of the Amberlite resin, and postreaction Pd and Cu species. The Pd2Cl3(PPh)2 precatalyst and CuI cocatalyst degrade to give Amberlite-supported metal nanoparticles (average size ∼2.7 nm). The guanosine product 2 formed using the Amberlite Pd/Cu catalyst system is of higher purity than reactions using a homogeneous Pd precatalyst, a prerequisite for use in biological applications. Copyright © Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Linking herbivory and pollination: Costs and selection implications in Centrosema virginianum Bentham (Fabaceae: Papilionoideae)

This research first evaluated levels and type of herbivory experienced by Centrosema virginianum plants in their native habitat and how florivory affected the pollinator activity. I found that populations of C. virginianum in two pine rockland habitat fragments experienced higher herbivory levels (15% and 22%) compared with plants in the protected study site (8.6%). I found that bees (Hymenoptera) pollinated butterfly pea. Furthermore, I found that florivores had a negative effect in the pollinators visitation rates and therefore in the seed set of the population. ^ I then conducted a study using a greenhouse population of C. virginianum. I applied artificial herbivory treatments: control, mild herbivory and severe herbivory. Flower size, pollen produced, ovules produced and seeds produced were negatively affected by herbivory. I did not find difference in nectar volume and quality by flowers among treatments. Surprisingly, severely damaged plants produced flowers with larger pollen than those from mildly damaged and undamaged plants. Results showed that plants tolerated mild and severe herbivory with 6% and 17% reduction of total fitness components, respectively. However, the investment of resources was not equisexual. ^ A comparison in the ability of siring seeds between large and small pollen was necessary to establish the biological consequence of size in pollen performance. I found that fruits produced an average of 18.7 ± 1.52 and 17.7 ± 1.50 from large and small pollen fertilization respectively. These findings supported a pollen number-size trade-off in plants under severe herbivory treatments. As far as I know, this result has not previously been reported. ^ Lastly, I tested how herbivory influenced seed abortion patterns in plants, examining how resources are allocated on different regions within fruits under artificial herbivory treatments. I found that self-fertilized fruits had greater seed abortion rates than cross-fertilized fruits. The proportion of seeds aborted was lower in the middle regions of the fruits in cross-fertilized fruits, producing more vigorous progeny. Self-fertilized fruits did not show patterns of seedling vigor. I also found that early abortion was higher closer to the peduncular end of the fruits. Position of seeds within fruits could be important in the seed dispersion mechanism characteristic of this species. ^

Linking Old Librarianship to New: Aligning 5-Steps of The Innovator's DNA in Creating Thematic Discovery Systems for the Everglades

This poster presentation from the May 2015 Florida Library Association Conference, along with the Everglades Explorer discovery portal at http://ee.fiu.edu, demonstrates how traditional bibliographic and curatorial principles can be applied to: 1) selection, cross-walking and aggregation of metadata linking end-users to wide-spread digital resources from multiple silos; 2) harvesting of select PDFs, HTML and media for web archiving and access; 3) selection of CMS domains, sub-domains and folders for targeted searching using an API. Choosing content for this discovery portal is comparable to past scholarly practice of creating and publishing subject bibliographies, except metadata and data are housed in relational databases. This new and yet traditional capacity coincides with: Growth of bibliographic utilities (MarcEdit); Evolution of open-source discovery systems (eXtensible Catalog); Development of target-capable web crawling and archiving systems (Archive-it); and specialized search APIs (Google). At the same time, historical and technical changes – specifically the increasing fluidity and re-purposing of syndicated metadata – make this possible. It equally stems from the expansion of freely accessible digitized legacy and born-digital resources. Innovation principles helped frame the process by which the thematic Everglades discovery portal was created at Florida International University. The path -- to providing for more effective searching and co-location of digital scientific, educational and historical material related to the Everglades -- is contextualized through five concepts found within Dyer and Christensen’s “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the five skills of disruptive innovators (2011). The project also aligns with Ranganathan’s Laws of Library Science, especially the 4th Law -- to "save the time of the user.”

ArrayMining: a modular web-application for microarray analysis combining ensemble and consensus methods with cross-study normalization

Background: Statistical analysis of DNA microarray data provides a valuable diagnostic tool for the investigation of genetic components of diseases. To take advantage of the multitude of available data sets and analysis methods, it is desirable to combine both different algorithms and data from different studies. Applying ensemble learning, consensus clustering and cross-study normalization methods for this purpose in an almost fully automated process and linking different analysis modules together under a single interface would simplify many microarray analysis tasks. Results: We present ArrayMining.net, a web-application for microarray analysis that provides easy access to a wide choice of feature selection, clustering, prediction, gene set analysis and cross-study normalization methods. In contrast to other microarray-related web-tools, multiple algorithms and data sets for an analysis task can be combined using ensemble feature selection, ensemble prediction, consensus clustering and cross-platform data integration. By interlinking different analysis tools in a modular fashion, new exploratory routes become available, e.g. ensemble sample classification using features obtained from a gene set analysis and data from multiple studies. The analysis is further simplified by automatic parameter selection mechanisms and linkage to web tools and databases for functional annotation and literature mining. Conclusion: ArrayMining.net is a free web-application for microarray analysis combining a broad choice of algorithms based on ensemble and consensus methods, using automatic parameter selection and integration with annotation databases.

Cross-correlations between weather variables in Australia

The information on climate variations is essential for the research of many subjects, such as the performance of buildings and agricultural production. However, recorded meteorological data are often incomplete. There may be a limited number of locations recorded, while the number of recorded climatic variables and the time intervals can also be inadequate. Therefore, the hourly data of key weather parameters as required by many building simulation programmes are typically not readily available. To overcome this gap in measured information, several empirical methods and weather data generators have been developed. They generally employ statistical analysis techniques to model the variations of individual climatic variables, while the possible interactions between different weather parameters are largely ignored. Based on a statistical analysis of 10 years historical hourly climatic data over all capital cities in Australia, this paper reports on the finding of strong correlations between several specific weather variables. It is found that there are strong linear correlations between the hourly variations of global solar irradiation (GSI) and dry bulb temperature (DBT), and between the hourly variations of DBT and relative humidity (RH). With an increase in GSI, DBT would generally increase, while the RH tends to decrease. However, no such a clear correlation can be found between the DBT and atmospheric pressure (P), and between the DBT and wind speed. These findings will be useful for the research and practice in building performance simulation.