Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita, a gastropod specific facultative parasite, has been used as a successful biological control agent across Europe under the brand name Nemaslug®. However, Phasmarhabditis nematodes have not been permitted for use in the United States since that they had not been found locally within the country. We surveyed nurseries an...
Due to the discovery of ribosome heterogeneity, there has opened a huge field of research surrounding the regulatory roles that ribosomal proteins play in cellular functions. Understanding how each one affects cell growth, differentiation, and maturation will build a more robust model of cellular development. This study aimed to analyze the effects...
Learned fear has been studied in invertebrates including Aplysia californica and Drosophila melanogaster. Signaling using the biogenic amines dopamine and serotonin are conserved between invertebrates and vertebrates. While Caenorhabditis elegans is a model organism that has been extensively used to study mechanisms of learning and memory in aversi...
Anthropogenic climate change is forecasted to increase in both severity and frequency, making it important now more than ever to be able to understand how coral will fare in the changing environment. Yet a prevalent gap in knowledge on coral physiology prevents accurate determination of coral health and energetics on the reef. The goal of my thesis...
Waste management and sustainable energy production are two major concerns of modern society. The use of microbial consortia for waste treatment has the potential to address both of these concerns simultaneously, since consortia possess the ability to convert crude biomass into biofuels and bio-based chemicals. The organic fraction of municipal soli...
For decades there has been considerable interest in understanding how variation in dispersal arises in nature. However, studying the dispersal of natural populations in an evolutionary framework is logistically challenging, thus, much of what we know about dispersal evolution comes from studies performed in artificial environments or in species wit...
The relationship between electronic cigarette (EC) use and SARS-CoV-2 infection is poorly understood and contradictory with claims that vaping both increases and decreases the likelihood of contracting COVID-19. The objective of this dissertation was to determine how EC fluids and aerosols affect SARS-CoV-2 infection of human cells and tissues. Res...
Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) pose a significant threat to public health, with thefrequency of emergence events increasing in recent decades. The vast majority of EIDs are zoonotic, meaning they transmit between animal and human hosts. We applied methods in genomics, epidemiology, and ecology in field, laboratory, and computational settings t...
Pre-implantation development depends on several processes, including the deposition of maternal factors into the oocyte during oogenesis, the expression of maternal mRNAs, and the degradation of maternal mRNA in tandem with zygotic genome activation during the maternal-to-zygotic transition (MZT). These processes ultimately determine whether an emb...
Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) is the most common form of temporal lobe epilepsy in adults, and is characterized by seizure activities and pathological changes in the limbic region, including the hippocampal formation. The dentate gyrus (DG) is thought to be a critical node in the hippocampus, with its unique properties, to prevent hippocampu...
