Genetic Analysis of Ethanol Sensitivity and Tolerance in Drosophila

The genetic pathways influencing alcohol abuse and dependence are poorly characterized. Many critical discoveries about the interactions between ethanol-related behaviors and genetics have been made in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Coupling the statistical power of model organism studies to human association studies bolsters the analytical efficacy of these genomic approaches. A variety of behavioral assays are available for assessing behavioral responses to ethanol in Drosophila. However, we find our previously described eRING assay is influenced by the commonly used transgenic marker mini-white. We developed a Simple Sedation Assay (SSA) that is insensitive to the effects of white and mini-white. In SSAs, expression of endogenous wild-type white was not necessary for normal responses to ethanol. Neither expression nor RNAi-mediated knockdown of the transgenic mini-white influenced the effects of ethanol in flies. Critically, mini-white expression did not affect the phenotypes of flies with known alterations in ethanol sensitivity. Also, loss of function mutations in Clic show decreased sensitivity to ethanol in both eRING assays (as previously reported) and SSAs. Therefore, we explored the role of the known Clic interactors, TGF-β and ryanodine receptors. These studies were inconclusive but do not exclude the need for future work. Finally, using bioinformatic tools we constructed a mutli-species network of genes predicted to interact with Clic. Our RNAi screen against the Clic network serves as an important proof-of-concept and holds great potential for uncovering important therapeutic targets for alcohol use disorders

Learning service leadership through service-learning : anxieties, opportunities and insights

Lingnan University (LU) is one of 8 tertiary institutions in Hong Kong that have received sponsorship for undergraduate students to acquire knowledge and develop attributes relating to service leadership. Service leadership may be conceptualized as leadership for service, exercised through distributed authority, aimed at identifying and meeting genuine needs of service recipients. Building on prior experience of embedding service-learning projects into discipline-based credit bearing courses, in term 1, 2012-13, LU introduced service leadership through service-learning into four courses. A predominantly qualitative, critical-incident approach was adopted to study processes of students’ learning on these courses. Data were collected through open-ended team reflection and self-reflection pro-formas, a peer review rubric, and focus group meetings. Findings suggest that service-learning projects can be powerful vehicles for learning and practicing service leadership attributes. Positive learning outcomes reported by students included: increased skills of oral communication, relationship building, time management and problem solving; and greater personal discipline, emotional intelligence, empathy for disadvantaged people and cross-cultural awareness. Students mentioned the importance of mutual care and support in teams, of formative feedback from host agencies/enterprises; of being appreciated by end service recipients; and of turning cultural diversity among team members into a powerful resource. We shall draw on an established model of competence development (Robinson, 1974; Wilhelm, 2011) to analyze students’ reported experiences. In terms of unconscious learning needs, students seemed relatively insensitive to the particular expectations of gatekeepers in their host organization and the constraints that they were facing, and rather than attempting to understand nuances and tensions within the service recipient habitat/ecosystem, they tended to fix their attention on the concerns of end-user service recipients. In terms of conscious learning needs, some teams became aware of the inadequacy of the traditional autocratic leadership paradigm, but appeared not to fully grasp the principles and practices of distributed leadership, while some students noticed service leadership qualities in other team members that they perceived were lacking in themselves. In terms of conscious competence, some students came to recognize their own talents in certain areas through taking initiatives to overcome difficulties. We discuss implications

Developing Civility and Connection in Midland, Michigan

Growing loneliness and incivility are on the rise across America. In Midland, Michigan, civic leaders desire to further infuse positive psychology into their community by enhancing positive citizenship through civil discourse and connection. They have identified this need after instances in their community where citizens have engaged in discourteous and unproductive speech. Informed by current psychological research, our team proposes improving civil discourse and increasing positive connections in Midland through holding community discussions using a Communication and Connections Discussion Guide. Community leaders will be trained as facilitators to lead discussions using the Discussion Guide with various groups of any type and size in Midland. We believe the citizens of Midland can and will learn to constructively engage with their fellow citizens for enhanced communities and a better future. We have every confidence that Midland leaders will persist until every sector in the community has been illuminated with the message of hope, warm communication, and strong connections offered by these principles and practices of well-being

Have We Ever Encountered This Before? Retrieving Out-of-Distribution Road Obstacles from Driving Scenes

In the life cycle of highly automated systems operating in an open and dynamic environment, the ability to adjust to emerging challenges is crucial. For systems integrating data-driven AI-based components, rapid responses to deployment issues require fast access to related data for testing and reconfiguration. In the context of automated driving, this especially applies to road obstacles that were not included in the training data, commonly referred to as out-of-distribution (OoD) road obstacles. Given the availability of large uncurated recordings of driving scenes, a pragmatic approach is to query a database to retrieve similar scenarios featuring the same safety concerns due to OoD road obstacles. In this work, we extend beyond identifying OoD road obstacles in video streams and offer a comprehensive approach to extract sequences of OoD road obstacles using text queries, thereby proposing a way of curating a collection of OoD data for subsequent analysis. Our proposed method leverages the recent advances in OoD segmentation and multi-modal foundation models to identify and efficiently extract safety-relevant scenes from unlabeled videos. We present a first approach for the novel task of text-based OoD object retrieval, which addresses the question ''Have we ever encountered this before?''.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, and 3 table

Functional Lipidomics analysis of retrovirus envelopes

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH