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Spring 2011
This study researches student engagement with issues related to the interaction between science and religion. The researcher’s background in teaching both science classes and religion classes and as a chaplain became part of the context for researching student tension between science and religion...
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Spring 2016
Schlacht, Alexander Douglas William
One of the features that distinguishes eukaryotes from prokaryotes is the membrane trafficking system. This system underpins much of the functionality of the eukaryotic cell, and is necessary for feeding, motility and communication. Analyses aimed at addressing the evolution of this system have...
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Fall 2019
Emergent communication is a framework for machine language acquisition that has recently been utilized to train deep neural networks to develop shared languages from scratch and use these languages to communicate and cooperate. Previous work on emergent communication has utilized gradient-based...
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Spring 2011
Forkhead (Fox) proteins are transcription factors that function in many processes including development, metabolism and cell cycle regulation. This gene family is divided into subfamilies that appear to originate from a common ancestor. I have identified the evolutionary selection pressures...
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Gene expression and sensory structures in sponges: Explorations of sensory-neural origins in a non-bilaterian context
DownloadFall 2017
The nervous system is present in all but two animal phyla – one of them being Porifera, sponges. Sponges have no neurons and yet have organized behavior and finely tuned sensation. Furthermore, sponges have genes involved in the nervous system of other animals (informally called ‘neural’ genes)....
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Genetic diversity and selection in North American red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus): A Hamiltonian perspective into the processes and mechanisms of evolution
DownloadFall 2013
The theory of natural selection has advanced our understanding in every aspect of biological sciences, yet despite this seeming ubiquity, there remain some components that are not fully resolved. Natural selection predicts the “selfish” advancement of genes that are optimally suited for their...
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Hsp90 and its co-chaperones regulate the activity of human Argonaute2 in RNA-mediated silencing pathways
DownloadFall 2011
The potent ability of small, double-stranded RNAs to silence gene expression was initially reported 1998, sparking revolutions in molecular biology and genetics. Since then, intensive research into the mechanism of RNA-mediated silencing has implicated the machinery of this pathway in the...
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Insights from Sponge Transcriptomes & Physiology about the Early Evolution of Nervous Systems
DownloadFall 2014
The origin of neurons and neural systems is a research area that has begun to experience increased progress with the growing availability of genomic data from a range of basal metazoans and closely related outgroups. This has allowed a reevaluation of previous models of neural evolution....
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Fall 2019
Cilia are microtubule-based structures that project from nearly every cell in the vertebrate body. While cilia in different contexts can have either sensory or motile functions, all cilia rely upon a core set of genes. When these genes are mutated either singly or in various combinations, a...