Research reports: The 1980 NASA/ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship Program

The Summer Faculty Fellowship Research Program objectives are: to further the professional knowledge of qualified engineering and science faculty members; to stimulate an exchange of ideas between participants and NASA; to enrich and refresh the research and teaching activities of participants and institutions; and to contribute to the research objectives at the NASA centers. The Faculty Fellows engaged in research projects commensurate with their interests and background and worked in collaboration with a NASA/MSFC colleague

Systems Genetics of DNA Damage Tolerance – Cisplatin, RAD5 & CRISPR-mediated Nonsense

DNA sequence information is constantly threatened by damage. In the clinic, intentional DNA damage is often used to treat cancer. Cisplatin, a first-line chemotherapy used to treat millions of patients, functions specifically by generating physical links within DNA strands, blocking DNA replication, and killing dividing cells. To maintain genome integrity, organisms have evolved the capacity to repair, respond, or otherwise resist change to the DNA sequence through a network of genetically encoded DNA damage tolerance pathways. In chapter 1, I present advances in experimental design and current progress for a systems genetics approach, using Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to reveal relationships between cisplatin tolerance pathways. Additionally, recent efforts to sequence thousands of cancer genomes have revealed recurrent genetic changes that cause overexpression of specific cisplatin tolerance genes. In chapter 2, I present a submitted manuscript that models overexpression of an essential cisplatin tolerance gene. This study uses a systems genetics approach to reveal the genetic pathways that are essential for tolerating this perturbation, which ultimately led to mechanistic insights for this gene. Convenient genome engineering in Saccharomyces has made this organism an ideal model to develop systems genetics concepts and approaches. In chapter 3, I present a published manuscript that demonstrates a new approach to disrupting genes by making site-specific nonsense mutations. Importantly, this approach does not require cytotoxic double-strand DNA breaks and is applicable to many model organisms for disrupting almost any gene, which may advance systems genetics into new model organisms. Systems genetics provides a framework for determining how DNA damage tolerance pathways act together to maintain cellular fitness and genome integrity. Such insights may one day help clinicians predict which cancers will respond to treatment, potentially sparing patients from unnecessary chemotherapy

Eye Movement Control: An Index for Athleticism

Athletic potential is one of the most complex human traits. An elite athlete is produced from a complex interaction of an innumerable number of traits exhibited by the athlete. However, it’s not clear whether these traits are innate, allowing the athlete to excel, or, alternatively, are a consequence of practice. To be successful, athletes rely heavily on sensory information from the visual and vestibular systems. This study investigated the relationship eye movement control has with innate athleticism by comparing the saccadic and Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex (VOR) responses of former, no longer practicing, elite athletes against their age and gender matched counterparts who were non-elite or non-athletes. Results showed subjects who participated in athletic activities longer (regardless of type or level achieved), showed both significantly better VOR suppression capabilities, as well as higher head velocities while suppressing their VOR. Although, these results are correlative in nature, they do not support the potential that VOR suppression is a learned trait of athletes. A longitudinal study would be required to assess this relationship fully

Dimension reduction of image and audio space

The reduction of data necessary for storage or transmission is a desirable goal in the digital video and audio domain. Compression schemes strive to reduce the amount of storage space or bandwidth necessary to keep or move the data. Data reduction can be accomplished so that visually or audibly unnecessary data is removed or recoded thus aiding the compression phase of the data processing. The characterization and identification of data that can be successfully removed or reduced is the purpose of this work. New philosophy, theory and methods for data processing are presented towards the goal of data reduction. The philosophy and theory developed in this work establish a foundation for high speed data reduction suitable for multi-media applications. The developed methods encompass motion detection and edge detection as features of the systems. The philosophy of energy flow analysis in video processing enables the consideration of noise in digital video data. Research into noise versus motion leads to an efficient and successful method of identifying motion in a sequence. The research of the underlying statistical properties of vector quantization provides an insight into the performance characteristics of vector quantization and leads to successful improvements in application. The underlying statistical properties of the vector quantization process are analyzed and three theorems are developed and proved. The theorems establish the statistical distributions and probability densities of various metrics of the vector quantization process. From these properties, an intelligent and efficient algorithm design is developed and tested. The performance improvements in both time and quality are established through algorithm analysis and empirical testing. The empirical results are presented

Development of an Oil Spill Emergency Mapping System Using Internet GIS

ince the 1970s, environmental monitoring in China has formed a complete web across the country with over 2000 monitoring stations. China State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) has published an annual report on the State of the Environment in China since 1989. The Chinese government began to inform the public of environmental quality and major pollution incidents through major media since the late 1990s. However, environmental quality data has not been adequately used because of constraints on access and data sharing. The public and interested groups still lack access to environmental data and information. After examining the current air quality reporting systems of the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Ontario Ministry of Environment, reviewing current Internet GIS technology and sample websites, this thesis developed an ArcIMS website to publish air quality data and provide background information to the public for the city of Dalian, China. The purpose is to inform the public of daily air quality and health concerns, and to improve public awareness of environmental issues. A better-informed and educated public will be more likely to voluntarily conserve the environment in the long run. The development of this thesis can satisfy most basic expectations. However, due to the limitation of current Internet products like ArcIMS, symbology and connection with outside databases are not adequate. In addition some regular GIS analysis functions are not available to Internet GIS products. This development can be further improved to serve other environmental data to the public with better interactivity through coding. Similar Internet GIS products can be used in other Chinese cities to report their air quality data. For internal data sharing and reporting within the government, an open, interoperable distributed GIService is recommended, which is believed to be the future of Internet GIS

Ceramide synthase 4: a novel metabolic regulator of oncogene-induced senescence

Senescence is a cell stress program characterized by a stable cell cycle arrest and thus aims to protect against replication of potentially harmful cells. In oncogene-induced senescence (OIS) the cell cycle arrest is brought about by activation of an oncogene. This in turn initiates a DNA damage response and subsequently, the DDR induces p53-p21 and RB tumour suppressor pathways. The metabolism of senescent cells is highly altered, notably there is increased secretion of proteins and increased functional activity of certain metabolic enzymes. There have been many recent studies investigating the role of specific metabolic pathways in OIS and how they may be targeted for therapeutic benefit. This thesis aims to identify novel metabolic regulators of OIS, by combining high throughput RNAi screening and LC-MS based methods. This thesis has identified and validated 17 essential OIS metabolic genes; in this list, there was enrichment for genes involved in lipid biosynthetic processes. Lipid metabolism was an attractive focus for this thesis as it has not been extensively studied in current literature. Next, ceramide synthase 4 (CERS4) was extensively validated as a key enzyme for both OIS and replicative senescence. Using LC-MS based lipidomics, CERS4-driven rewiring of lipid metabolism in OIS was revealed and this corresponded with an accumulation of ceramides due to increased de novo ceramide synthesis. It was then confirmed OIS-related ceramide is mechanistically linked to cell cycle via the PP1-RB-E2F axis. Ceramide activates PP1, which physically binds to RB in a CERS4-dependent manner. PP1 is then able to dephosphorylate and activate RB, which inhibits transcription of E2F targets (cell cycle genes). Overall, this thesis identifies a metabolic checkpoint that links altered lipid metabolism with OIS

Movie Tags Prediction and Segmentation Using Deep Learning

The sheer volume of movies generated these days requires an automated analytics for ef cient classi cation, query-based search, and extraction of desired information. These tasks can only be ef ciently performed by a machine learning based algorithm. We address the same issue in this paper by proposing a deep learning based technique for predicting the relevant tags for a movie and segmenting the movie with respect to the predicted tags. We construct a tag vocabulary and create the corresponding dataset in order to train a deep learning model. Subsequently, we propose an ef cient shot detection algorithm to nd the key frames in the movie. The extracted key frames are analyzed by the deep learning model to predict the top three tags for each frame. The tags are then assigned weighted scores and are ltered to generate a compact set of most relevant tags. This process also generates a corpus which is further used to segment a movie based on a selected tag. We present a rigorous analysis of the segmentation quality with respect to the number of tags selected for the segmentation. Our detailed experiments demonstrate that the proposed technique is not only ef cacious in predicting the most relevant tags for a movie, but also in segmenting the movie with respect to the selected tags with a high accuracy

Laser Light Scattering Study of Local Order in Sheared Colloidal Liquids

Physic