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Skip to Search Results- 2Miyashita, Tetsuto
- 1Adams, Emily
- 1Aragones Suarez, Pablo
- 1Bird, Heather M
- 1Byers, Kaylee A.
- 1Carey, Shane F
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Development, Anatomy, and Phylogenetic Relationships of Jawless Vertebrates and Tests of Hypotheses about Early Vertebrate Evolution
DownloadSpring 2018
The origin and early evolution of vertebrates remain one of the central questions of comparative biology. This clade, which features a breathtaking diversity of complex forms, has generated profound, unresolved questions, including: How are major lineages of vertebrates related to one another?...
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Fall 2016
Suspension feeders are an important component of carbon exchange between the water column and the seafloor, a process called pelagic-benthic coupling. Sponges (Phylum Porifera) are filter feeders that consume especially small particles. They eat bacteria, which are inaccessible to most other...
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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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Evolution of the sponge body plan: Wnt and the development of polarity in freshwater sponges
DownloadSpring 2014
Body polarity is a fundamental aspect of all multicellular organisms. Metazoans – animals – are monophyletic, but is body polarity homologous among all phyla? Sponges are considered to have branched off first from other animals and therefore studies of polarity formation in the simple sponge body...
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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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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....