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Comparative Analysis of the Anatomy of the Myxinoidea and the Ancestry of Early Vertebrate Lineages
DownloadFall 2012
The question of whether a hagfish is a true vertebrate or not has profound implications about the ancestry of the clade. New anatomical evidence allows a test of their systematic position. With dissections and serial sections of original specimens, and with a literature review, a comparative...
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Understanding the evolution of the membrane trafficking system in diverse eukaryotes through comparative genomics and transcriptomics
DownloadSpring 2018
Single-celled organisms represent the majority of eukaryotic diversity. Recent advances in sequencing technologies have been critical for understanding the evolutionary biology and cell biology of microbial eukaryotes. Comparative genomic analyses have shown that many genes that underlie...
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Fall 2010
Epithelia form protective barriers and regulate molecule transport between the mesenchyme and environment. Amongst all metazoans, only sponges are said to lack 'true' epithelia however the physiology of sponge cell layers are rarely studied empirically. Aggregates and gemmules of a freshwater...
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Fall 2014
Smallpox was eradicated using vaccinia viruses (VACV) as vaccines, including Dryvax, a calf-lymph vaccine derived from the New York City Board of Health (NYCBH) strain, and TianTan, a chicken egg cultured vaccine used exclusively in China. To take advantage of the next generation sequencing...
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Fall 2013
The phylogenetic relationships of the destructive spruce budworm group of forest pests (Choristoneura fumiferana species complex) have previously been explored using allozymes, microsatellites, mitochondrial genes and a nuclear gene, but remain poorly resolved with conflicting topologies. I used...
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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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The Evolutionary Ecology of Parasitic Strategies: Experimental Evolution with a Facultatively Ectoparasitic Mite
DownloadSpring 2019
Although parasitism is a ubiquitous lifestyle, little empirical evidence exists for how and why parasitism evolves from free-living lineages. Analysis of phylogenetic relationships among taxa that exhibit a range of lifestyles has aided in the development of a commonly proposed hypothesis for the...
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Respiration, Acid/Base, Ammonia and Ionoregulatory Strategies in the Pacific hagfish (Eptatretus stoutii)
DownloadFall 2016
Hagfish feed on putrefied carrion, which poses several environmental challenges to the scavenger including hypoxia (Low PO2), hypercapnia (high PCO2) and high environmental ammonia (HEA). To any other organism, these conditions would be physiologically challenging; however, hagfish seem to have...
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Carotenoid diversity in novel Hymenobacter strains isolated from Victoria Upper Glacier, Antarctica, and implications for the evolution of microbial carotenoid biosynthesis
DownloadFall 2009
Many diverse microbes have been detected in or isolated from glaciers, including novel taxa exhibiting previously unrecognized physiological properties with significant biotechnological potential. Of 29 unique phylotypes isolated from Victoria Upper Glacier, Antarctica (VUG), 12 were related to...
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Fall 2017
Leafrollers moths are one of the most ecologically and economically important groups of herbivorous insects. These Lepidoptera are an ideal model for exploring the drivers that modulate the processes of diversification over time. This thesis analyzes the evolution of Choristoneura Lederer, a well...