Whole tumor antigen vaccination using dendritic cells: Comparison of RNA electroporation and pulsing with UV-irradiated tumor cells

Because of the lack of full characterization of tumor associated antigens for solid tumors, whole antigen use is a convenient approach to tumor vaccination. Tumor RNA and apoptotic tumor cells have been used as a source of whole tumor antigen to prepare dendritic cell (DC) based tumor vaccines, but their efficacy has not been directly compared. Here we compare directly RNA electroporation and pulsing of DCs with whole tumor cells killed by ultraviolet (UV) B radiation using a convenient tumor model expressing human papilloma virus (HPV) E6 and E7 oncogenes. Although both approaches led to DCs presenting tumor antigen, electroporation with tumor cell total RNA induced a significantly higher frequency of tumor-reactive IFN-gamma secreting T cells, and E7-specific CD8+ lymphocytes compared to pulsing with UV-irradiated tumor cells. DCs electroporated with tumor cell RNA induced a larger tumor infiltration by T cells and produced a significantly stronger delay in tumor growth compared to DCs pulsed with UV-irradiated tumor cells. We conclude that electroporation with whole tumor cell RNA and pulsing with UV-irradiated tumor cells are both effective in eliciting antitumor immune response, but RNA electroporation results in more potent tumor vaccination under the examined experimental conditions

Climate Change and the Puget Sound: Building the Legal Framework for Adaptation

The scope of climate change impacts is expected to be extraordinary, touching every ecosystem on the planet and affecting human interactions with the natural and built environment. From increased surface and water temperatures to sea level rise and more frequent extreme weather events, climate change promises vast and profound alterations to our world. Indeed, scientists predict continued climate change impacts regardless of any present or future mitigation efforts due to the long-lived nature of greenhouse gases emitted over the last century. The need to adapt to this new future is crucial. Adaptation may take a variety of forms, from implementing certain natural resources management strategies to applying principles of water law to mimic the natural water cycle. The goal of adaptation efforts is to lessen the magnitude of these impacts on humans and the natural environment through proactive and planned actions. The longer we wait to adopt a framework and laws for adapting to climate change, the more costly and painful the process will become. This publication identifies both foundational principles and specific strategies for climate change adaptation across the Puget Sound Basin. The projected impacts themselves of climate change in the region were well studied in a landmark 2009 report by the state-commissioned Climate Impacts Group. This publication analyzes adaptation options within the existing legal and regulatory framework in Washington. Recognizing the economic and political realities may not lead to new legislation, the recommendations focus on how existing laws can be applied and made more robust to include climate change adaptation

Climate Change and the Puget Sound: Building the Legal Framework for Adaptation

The scope of climate change impacts is expected to be extraordinary, touching every ecosystem on the planet and affecting human interactions with the natural and built environment. From increased surface and water temperatures to sea level rise and more frequent extreme weather events, climate change promises vast and profound alterations to our world. Indeed, scientists predict continued climate change impacts regardless of any present or future mitigation efforts due to the long-lived nature of greenhouse gases emitted over the last century. The need to adapt to this new future is crucial. Adaptation may take a variety of forms, from implementing certain natural resources management strategies to applying principles of water law to mimic the natural water cycle. The goal of adaptation efforts is to lessen the magnitude of these impacts on humans and the natural environment through proactive and planned actions. The longer we wait to adopt a framework and laws for adapting to climate change, the more costly and painful the process will become. This publication identifies both foundational principles and specific strategies for climate change adaptation across the Puget Sound Basin. The projected impacts themselves of climate change in the region were well studied in a landmark 2009 report by the state-commissioned Climate Impacts Group. This publication analyzes adaptation options within the existing legal and regulatory framework in Washington. Recognizing the economic and political realities may not lead to new legislation, the recommendations focus on how existing laws can be applied and made more robust to include climate change adaptation

Caught between Empires: Pre-Famine Irish Immigrants in Santiago de Cuba, 1665-1847

This thesis examines the complex experiences of Irish immigrants in city and province of Santiago de Cuba. For some pre-Famine Irish immigrants, Cuba was an island of opportunities, and these often lay in the burgeoning sugar and coffee industries, industries that were dependant of enslaved labour and the slave-trade. Santiago de Cuba, a small city of almost no relevance to the Spanish American empire, appears as an unlikely destination for Irish migrants, but, although they were only a handful of families, their contribution is significant and under-explored. The present work examines those Irish families who settled permanently in Santiago from the 17th century until the eve of the Irish Great Famine in 1845. They are composed of two distinctive groups of Irish immigrants. The first one arrived from Spain throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. They developed a sense of symbolic Irish identity, expressed through naming practices, and had a hand in creating the élite cohort into which the immigrants of the second group inserted themselves in the early decades of the 19th century. The first group employed strategies to achieve social mobility and to maintain some degree of ethnic cohesion. They saw in marital alliances as a highly strategic practice that placed them into the local élite and into key colonial institutions in order to assimilate and integrate into their host society. By contrast, the second group was composed of a wider cohort of clearly transnational and trans-imperial adventurers. They sojourned in the United States, towards which market they focused their enterprises by creating trading firms and investing in coffee cultivation. They exploited the interstices of the Spanish and British empires, and of the United States’ “informal one”, to become some of the wealthiest planters and merchants in eastern Cuba. By 1827 these groups had merged into one élite that was politically and socially conservative, and religiously Catholic. They were fiercely pro-slavery and fervent supporters of the maintenance of the Spanish colonial status quo. The arguments made in this work are sustained in primary sources such as letters, genealogical data, parish records, business letters, and diplomat’s dispatches, among others. These sources were found in archival collections in Cuba, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Spain

Investigation of Sputtered Hafnium Oxides for Gate Dielectric Applications in Integrated Circuits

This work investigated high permittivity hafnium based dielectric films for use in future generation metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) technologies. For the sub- 100 nm MOS structure, the conventional Si02 gate dielectric required is becoming too thin ( Two deposition processes were used for investigating hafnium oxide: A traditional reactive sputtering process using a hafnium target and oxygen along with a metal oxidation process in which hafnium metal was deposited and subsequently oxidized in a rapid thermal processor. The films and their interfacial layers were studied using transmission electron microscopy and Rutherford backscattering. Suppression of the interfacial layers was attempted by utilizing various pre-deposition cleaning processes, nitrogen incorporation, and multiple annealing conditions. Statistical analysis was performed on many film properties including: thickness and refractive index by ellipsometry, equivalent oxide thickness (EOT), relative permittivity (sr), total charge density (Nss) via capacitance-voltage analysis (C-V), oxide charge density (Qox) and interface trap charge density (DiT) from surface charge analysis, and breakdown strength vi and leakage current density from current-voltage analysis (I-V). Hafnium oxide was successfully integrated into an RIT sub-micron NMOS process, and operational 0.5 um transistors were fabricated and tested

On a theorem of Ranee Brylinski

In her thesis [RB], Ranee Brylinski (then Gupta) studied the orbit structure of the projective variety of abelian subalgebras of a …xed dimension, k, in a simple Lie algebra, g, over C under its adjoint group, G. Fix a Borel subalgebra, b, of g and let B be the closed subgroup of G corresponding to b. Then the Bore

Locally non-geometric fluxes and missing momenta in M-theory

We use exceptional field theory to describe locally non-geometric spaces of M-theory of more than three dimensions. For these spaces, we find a new set of locally non-geometric fluxes which lie in the R-R sector in the weak-coupling limit and can typically be characterised by mixed symmetry tensors. These spaces thus provide new examples of non-geometric backgrounds which go beyond the NS-NS sector of string theory. Starting from twisted tori we construct duality chains that lead to these new non-geometric backgrounds and we show that, just as in the four-dimensional case, there are missing momenta associated to the mixed symmetry tensors