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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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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 2016
Transferrin is an evolutionary conserved protein that in addition to having a critical role in iron transport also has been shown to have a crucial role in host defence. Transferrin has been shown to sequester iron from invading pathogens, act directly against microbial pathogens, and is an...
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The Paleobiology, Paleoecology, and Evolution of Thescelosauridae (Ornithischia) from Alberta, Canada
DownloadFall 2021
Thescelosauridae is a basal neornithischian dinosaur clade that flourished in the Cretaceous from the Aptian to the Maastrichtian. This diverse but poorly studied group of small-bodied herbivores is divided taxonomically into Orodrominae and Thescelosaurinae, and existed in Asia and North and...
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Fall 2017
Three species of Cretaceous marine squamates are described or redescribed. The first, Pontosaurus ribaguster is described from a relatively complete specimen discovered on Hvar Island, Croatia. Preservation of identifiable nektonic teleosts within the gastric cavity (the first identifiable...
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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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Fall 2020
Dromaeosaurids were small to medium sized theropod dinosaurs that diversified during the Late Cretaceous, reaching a near cosmopolitan distribution. They were diverse in morphology from the small four-winged gliders of Microraptorinae, to the bear-sized giant ‘raptors’ like Achillobator or...
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The development and biomechanics of theropod teeth and comparisons with other reptiles: a functional analysis
DownloadSpring 2012
Teeth are important for taxonomic studies. They are often the only remains found of certain vertebrates in the fossil record. This is because they are more resistant to weathering than most bones, they are small, and they are generally abundant. Most reptiles have homodont dentition, and 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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Fall 2013
Ortiz Sandoval, Carolina Guadalupe
The ER mitochondria-associated membrane (MAM) is a hub for many calcium-mediated processes required for cell survival, including apoptosis, autophagy, and ATP production. In this thesis, we identified and characterized the interaction between MAM-enriched Rab32 and its effector Drp1, a master...