Phylogenetic Analysis of Human Cytomegalovirus pUS27 and pUS28: Ascertaining an Independent or Linked Evolutionary History

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a widespread pathogen that is particularly skilled at evading immune detection and defense mechanisms, largely due to extensive co-evolution with its host’s immune system. One aspect of this co-evolution involves the acquisition of four virally encoded GPCR chemokine receptor homologs, products of the US27, US28, UL33 and UL78 genes. G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) are the largest family of cell surface proteins, found in organisms from yeast to humans. In this research, phylogenetic analysis was used to investigate the origins of the US27 and US28 genes, which are adjacent in the viral genome. The results indicate that both US27 and US28 share the same common ancestor, the gene for human chemokine receptor CX3CR1, suggesting that a single human gene was captured and that a viral gene duplication event occurred. It also appears that after the gene duplication event, US27 may have undergone neofunctionalization, while US28 maintained the function of their ancestral gene. While the evolutionary advantage of the gene duplication and neofunctionalization event remains unclear, experimental evidence indicates that each gene has evolved distinct, important functions during virus infection

The Acquisition and Analysis of Electroencephalogram Data for the Classification of Benign Partial Epilepsy of Childhood with Centrotemporal Spikes

In this thesis, I will expand upon each step in the process of acquiring and analyzing electroencephalogram (EEG) for the classification of benign childhood epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes. Despite huge advancements in the field of health informatics—natural language processing, machine learning, predictive modeling—there are significant barriers to the access of clinical data. These barriers include information blocking, privacy policy concerns, and a lack of stakeholder support. We will see that these roadblocks are all responsible for stunting biomedical research in some way, including my own experiences in acquiring the data for the second chapter of this thesis. This second chapter expands upon just one possible advancement that can be achieved when researchers attain clinical data (in this case, EEG data). BECTS is a type of epilepsy that only displays epileptiform activity on night-time EEGs. We hypothesize that a brain affected by BECTS is also developmentally different during the daytime, and based on this assumption, our analysis aims to uncover these electrodynamic distinctions. After course-graining raw EEG segments, we extracted sample entropy, recurrence rate, laminarity, and determinism using recurrence quantitative analysis. Our results displayed two major findings. First, awake BECTS and control patients can be classified with no overlap using all of these features. Second, BECTS patients show differences in sleep state RQA values from centrotemporal and non-centrotemporal regions. We cannot confirm if these differences display epileptiform activity, however, because we do not have controls for sleep studies. With proper development and implementation, this research has the potential to become a clinical decision support tool and decrease the need for inconvenient sleep studies

Mechanical Engineering Design Project report: Enabler control systems

The Controls Group was assigned the responsibility for designing the Enabler's control system. The requirement for the design was that the control system must provide a simple user interface to control the boom articulation joints, chassis articulation joints, and the wheel drive. The system required controlling hydraulic motors on the Enabler by implementing 8-bit microprocessor boards. In addition, feedback to evaluate positions and velocities must be interfaced to provide the operator with confirmation as well as control

Manufacturing checkout of orbital operational stages Midterm report, period ending 24 Feb. 1965

Manufacturing checkout of orbital operational Saturn S-IVB stage and instrument unit for parking orbit operation

Virus-Host Co-evolution: Determining the Origin of Human Cytomegalovirus US27 and US28

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) are the largest family of cell surface proteins, found in organisms from yeast to humans. Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a widespread pathogen that is particularly skilled at evading immune detection and defense mechanisms, largely due to extensive co-evolution with its host’s immune system. One aspect of this co-evolution involves the acquisition of four virally encoded GPCR homologs: US27, US28, UL33 and UL78. In this research, phylogenetic analysis was used to investigate the origins of the US27 and US28 genes, which are adjacent in the viral genome. The results indicate that both US27 and US28 share the same common ancestor, human chemokine receptor CX3CR1, suggesting that a single human gene was captured and a viral gene duplication event occurred. While the evolutionary purpose of the gene duplication event remains unclear, experimental evidence indicates that each gene has evolved distinct, important functions during virus infection

Recent pace of change in human impact on the world's ocean.

Humans interact with the oceans in diverse and profound ways. The scope, magnitude, footprint and ultimate cumulative impacts of human activities can threaten ocean ecosystems and have changed over time, resulting in new challenges and threats to marine ecosystems. A fundamental gap in understanding how humanity is affecting the oceans is our limited knowledge about the pace of change in cumulative impact on ocean ecosystems from expanding human activities - and the patterns, locations and drivers of most significant change. To help address this, we combined high resolution, annual data on the intensity of 14 human stressors and their impact on 21 marine ecosystems over 11 years (2003-2013) to assess pace of change in cumulative impacts on global oceans, where and how much that pace differs across the ocean, and which stressors and their impacts contribute most to those changes. We found that most of the ocean (59%) is experiencing significantly increasing cumulative impact, in particular due to climate change but also from fishing, land-based pollution and shipping. Nearly all countries saw increases in cumulative impacts in their coastal waters, as did all ecosystems, with coral reefs, seagrasses and mangroves at most risk. Mitigation of stressors most contributing to increases in overall cumulative impacts is urgently needed to sustain healthy oceans

The public health rationale for promoting plant protein as an important part of a sustainable and healthy diet

Open Access via Wiley publishing agreement. Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division (GrantNumber(s): 1st April 2016 \ 31st March 2022) Minister of Science and Higher Education (GrantNumber(s): Project No. 010/RID/2018/19)Peer reviewedPublisher PD

MusicSoar: Soar as an Architecture for Music Cognition

Newell (1990) argued that the time is ripe for unified theories of cognition that encompass the full scope of cognitive phenomena. Newell and his colleagues (Newell, 1990; Laird, NeweU & Rosenbloom, 1987) have proposed Soar as a candidate theory. W e are exploring the application of Soar to the domain of music cognition. MusicSoar is a theory of the cognitive processes in music perception. A n important feature of MusicSoar is that it attempts to satisfy the real-time constraints of music perception within the Soar framework. If MusicSoar is a plausible model of music cognition, then it indicates that much of a listener's ability is based on a kind of memory-based reasoning involving pattern recognition and fast retrieval of information from memory: Soar's problem-solving methods of creating subgoals are too slow for routine perception, but they are involved in creating the knowledge in long-term memory that then can meet the processing demands of music in real time