Synthesis of amino acid-derived ligands and investigation of their metal binding properties and biological applications

In this thesis, two different potential fluorescent probes for metal ions and four potential anticancer drugs have been designed, synthesised, characterised and studied for their metal binding properties and biological applications.This report aims to design and synthesise amino acid-derived ligands as potential metal ion sensors in biological and aqueous systems. Metal ions play many pivotal roles in biological systems such as catalysing biochemical reactions and creating action potentials allowing for the movement of organisms. Dysfunction of such metals can contribute to the development of diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Wilson’s disease. As a result, the biological roles of metal ions are of great intrigue to many scientists in multiple fields. These researchers depend upon the development of more ideal fluorescent sensors for metal ions to conduct their investigations. Unfortunately, current fluorescent probes for metal ions have limitations such as poor selectivity to their analyte, weak fluorescence intensity, and are often unsuitable for biological application due to poor water solubility, and high cytotoxicity. Therefore, the development of new probes is important to enhance the knowledge of metal ions in biology and medicine.The fluorescent sensors synthesised in this thesis report that undergo cell viability assays with low effective concentration (EC) values are declared inappropriate for biological metal sensing. Their high cytotoxicity is therefore explored as potential anticancer agents when bound to lanthanides. Cancer constitutes to the top three of the total world’s deaths. Platinum-based anticancer drugs have been the focal point of many chemotherapies used to treat cancer-related illnesses, however, are limited with intrinsic resistance and have negative side-effects due to a lack of cell selectivity. Other metal-based therapies, such as lanthanides-based therapies, have come of intrigue as potential substitutes for platinum-based drugs due to their unique properties. Despite the potential of lanthanide complexes as alternative anticancer therapies, this area of research has not received much attention

The Status of Wildlife in Protected Areas Compared to Non-Protected Areas of Kenya

We compile over 270 wildlife counts of Kenya's wildlife populations conducted over the last 30 years to compare trends in national parks and reserves with adjacent ecosystems and country-wide trends. The study shows the importance of discriminating human-induced changes from natural population oscillations related to rainfall and ecological factors. National park and reserve populations have declined sharply over the last 30 years, at a rate similar to non-protected areas and country-wide trends. The protected area losses reflect in part their poor coverage of seasonal ungulate migrations. The losses vary among parks. The largest parks, Tsavo East, Tsavo West and Meru, account for a disproportionate share of the losses due to habitat change and the difficulty of protecting large remote parks. The losses in Kenya's parks add to growing evidence for wildlife declines inside as well as outside African parks. The losses point to the need to quantify the performance of conservation policies and promote integrated landscape practices that combine parks with private and community-based measures

Earth Day Reflections at Western

There is a lot of wonderful talk these days about the environment here at Western. As part of UNCTomorrow, we have committed to sustainability as a core institutional value and accepted the charge to“assume a leadership role in addressing the state’s energy and environmental challenges.” We haveembraced the idea that as a public institution we must be good stewards of place. This latter concepthas been applied mostly to the civic and economic health of our local community, but it can scarcelybe denied that being stewards of place commits us to the environmental health and ecological integrityof the land as well

Scope and Arbitration in Machine Learning Clinical EEG Classification

A key task in clinical EEG interpretation is to classify a recording or session as normal or abnormal. In machine learning approaches to this task, recordings are typically divided into shorter windows for practical reasons, and these windows inherit the label of their parent recording. We hypothesised that window labels derived in this manner can be misleading for example, windows without evident abnormalities can be labelled `abnormal' disrupting the learning process and degrading performance. We explored two separable approaches to mitigate this problem: increasing the window length and introducing a second-stage model to arbitrate between the window-specific predictions within a recording. Evaluating these methods on the Temple University Hospital Abnormal EEG Corpus, we significantly improved state-of-the-art average accuracy from 89.8 percent to 93.3 percent. This result defies previous estimates of the upper limit for performance on this dataset and represents a major step towards clinical translation of machine learning approaches to this problem.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

Community college selective enrollment and the challenge to open access

The open access mission is central to the community college role and mission in higher education. Although initially implemented by four-year colleges and universities, adoption of formal enrollment management initiatives in community colleges is on the increase. Admission, matriculation, retention, and persistence are affected by enrollment management policies. Initiatives designed to control enrollment may alter the open access commitment of the community college by limiting access to some students. Enrollment management practices at the community college can include selective marketing and recruiting practices. This study examined the prevalence of selective marketing and recruiting practices at North Carolina community colleges and the impact of such practices on enrollment. Results of the study indicated that about half of the community colleges in North Carolina practice selective marketing and recruiting practices, although to date those practices have had no apparent impact on the demographic composition of the student body. Student demographic representation in enrollment at North Carolina community colleges was statistically significantly different than the corresponding demographic composition of college service areas. Organizational depth of marketing implementation at selective colleges was compared to the demographic composition of student body enrollment. There was no relationship between organizational depth of marketing implementation at selective colleges and student body demographic composition. Study results inform decisions affecting the use of selective marketing and recruiting practices within the context of the open access mission at the community college. Implications for policy and practice include the recommendation to create an enrollment management division at each community college, to streamline use of the marketing dollar, and to increase the use of marketing to influence the decision-making process of internal stakeholders

The visual rhetoric of narrative

In her essay “On Narrativity in the Visual Field: A Psychoanalytic View of Velázquez’s Las Meninas,” Efrat Biberman asks: “Does narrativity by definition contradict visuality, and if so, why is it so prevalent in the context of painting?” (Narrative 14.3 (2006): 237-253, at 237) As one of the primary objectives of my painting is eliciting narrative potential through my images, the question of whether a visual experience is compatible with narrativity—something typically associated with the more temporal tradition of literature—is particularly relevant to my work and thus forms the subject of my critical essay. My initial investigations into narratology and the theories of Roland Barthes and Gerald Prince make clear that the concepts of narrativity are applicable not solely to the written word, but also to the visual arena. As Marie-Laure Ryan writes in her essay “The Modes of Narrativity and Their Visual Metaphors,” “reconstructing the plot is as fundamental to the understanding of the narrative text as identifying the depicted object is to the mental processing of a representational artwork.” (Style 26.3, (1992): 368-387 at 370) Concepts such as the micro-narrative and the macro-narrative, as discussed in Ryan’s piece, speak to the subjectivity by which viewers decipher narratives found in a work of art and touch upon one of the foundational impulses behind the art-making process throughout human history. As a painter, the act of painting is integral to the process of discovery that occurs as I find my way to a finished composition. My recent body of work is primarily figurative, though the figures exist in an ambiguous picture plane along with abstract patterns, scrawled text and gestural marks that trace the evolution of the final image. I often work in the diptych format, echoing the panels found in comics and graphic novels and referencing both the passage of time and a binary narrative relationship. The figures that inhabit my paintings are based on personal and historical photographs and, recently, video stills taken with my phone. The relationship between photography and painting as exemplified by artists such as Luc Tuymans, Gehardt Richter, and Peter Doig has opened a direction for experimentation:. by enlarging images found in photographs and rendering them in paint on canvas, the photographed moment is re-contextualized as a work of art directly linked to the figurative tradition of painting, and quite literally given new life through the act of painting, divorced from mechanical methods. The image has been transformed through the artist’s particular handling of paint, and given meaning through the simple fact of having been selected from innumerable choices. The images that I arrive at in my paintings suggest narratives that touch on themes of memory, history, masculinity, alienation, fatherhood, and our complex relationship with the natural world

Community college students' pro-environmental behaviors and their relationship to awareness of college sustainability strategy implementation

The impact of humans on the environment has caused a need to evaluate why individuals act in non-sustainable ways. How to change current non-sustainable behaviors is a focus in current social research. Authors have written about the use of varied strategies to change specific non-sustainable behaviors, but few have actually evaluated how such strategies influence general pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs). Higher education institutions have been called upon to increase knowledge and awareness of environmental issues in order to change these behaviors, not only through curricula but through modeling of sustainable practices. Many articles have been written describing such initiatives. However, few studies have actually evaluated how these initiatives have their impact on college students’ behaviors. One of the ways to study such behaviors and antecedents of those behaviors is through the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). This theory states that behavior is predicted by intention which is in turn predicted by attitudes, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control. The purposes of this study were to determine whether the TPB could be used to predict general environmental behavior of students on community college campuses, to determine how aware students were of sustainable strategy implementation by those colleges, and to evaluate whether there was a relationship between student awareness of such initiatives and the constructs of TPB. Study participants included 724 curriculum students at four different community colleges in NC purposefully selected for differences in sustainability strategy implementation. Three of the colleges were considered high implementation colleges and one was considered low implementation. Variations on scales previously used by other researchers studying such relationships were used to collect data. Scales were built using confirmatory factor analysis. The reduced sets of items were combined for each construct and first used to test the model of the TPB using path analysis. Antecedents of intention did predict intention with subjective norm and perceived behavioral control having the most influence. Intention also predicted PEB. None of the other constructs had a direct influence on PEB. Next, respecifications of the models were created based on the influence of low awareness and high awareness on the constructs in order to compare influence of awareness levels, and were found to be different for the two groups. General awareness of sustainable strategy implementation of the community college students was also assessed. Overall, students were not very aware of the strategies occurring on their campuses and they sometimes reported being aware of activities that did not exist. It did appear that students enrolled in the college that instituted many sustainable practices and activities, and promoted these initiatives, did have higher awareness. Implications from this study include the need for social marketing strategies which highlight initiatives on campuses and make PEB easier. In addition, this study highlights the need for similar studies that not only include students but faculty and staff, and the need for an instrument that measures awareness of initiatives

The effect of wort oxygenation on beer ester concentration

Oxygenation of wort during the beer brewing process is a common practice. It is most commonly used to increase the effectiveness of yeast during fermentation. However, in this experimentation the effect of wort oxygenation is examined through the production of esters and fusel alcohols. Esters and fusel alcohols are a little known chemical element in beer production, but are the cause of many beer aromas and flavors. These flavors are used to enhance and control the style and flavor characteristics of beer. Many of the esters found in beer represent flavors found in nature, but not the actual ingredients used for making the beer. One such ester, phenyl ethyl acetate, provides flavors such as honey and rose. Other esters provide a range in flavor from solvent-like to banana. This research looks past theoretical assumptions of the chemical and biological process of ester formation and looks to predict ester formation based on wort oxygenation levels. Samples of beer were oxygenated throughout the ranges of 0-25ppm and the subsequent ester and fusel alcohol concentrations were measured