Progress Report on a Survey of the Spiders of Iowa

The senior author began a study of Iowa spiders in the fall of 1936 when a black widow (Latrodectus mactaus texanus) was collected in Linn County. This was reported in Science (Stiles, 1937) and constituted the first official record of the black widow for Iowa. This record was of special interest because Minnesota and Iowa had been listed as the only states from which this spider had not been reported officially. It was discovered at that time that the spider was one of Iowa\u27s most neglected animals. Only three papers on our spider fauna have been reported to the Iowa Academy of Science in the past fifty years ; and there are no good collections of spiders in the State at the present time. In view of the incompleteness of our knowledge concerning Iowa\u27s spiders, it was thought worthwhile to begin a systematic study of them. It is the ambition of the Coe College Biology Department to make a study of the Araneae similar to that which Jaques (1932) is making on insects, thereby rounding out, somewhat, our knowledge of Iowa animal life. This is being undertaken with a full realization of the tremendous size of the task and the improbability that it will ever be wholly finished

PLENARY PANEL: A 360-DEGREE VIEW OF SCIENCE AND AGRICULTURAL POLICY; EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Agricultural and Food Policy,

Nuclear Propelled Vessels and Neutrino Oscillation Experiments

We study the effect of naval nuclear reactors on the study of neutrino oscillations. We find that the presence of naval reactors at unknown locations and times may limit the accuracy of future very long baseline reactor-based neutrino oscillation experiments. At the same time we argue that a nuclear powered surface ship such as a large Russian ice-breaker may provide an ideal source for precision experiments. While the relatively low reactor power would in this case require a larger detector, the source could be conveniently located at essentially any distance from a detector built at an underground location near a shore in a region of the world far away from other nuclear installations. The variable baseline would allow for a precise measurement of backgrounds and greatly reduced systematics from reactor flux and detector efficiency. In addition, once the oscillation measurement is completed, the detector could perform geological neutrino and astrophysical measurements with minimal reactor background.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Intelligent Queries over BIRN Data using the Foundational Model of Anatomy and a Distributed Query-Based Data Integration System

We demonstrate the usefulness of the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) ontology in reconciling different neuroanatomical parcellation schemes in order to facilitate automatic annotation and “intelligent” querying and visualization over a large multisite fMRI study of schizophrenic versus normal controls

Enabling RadLex with the Foundational Model of Anatomy Ontology to Organize and Integrate Neuro-imaging Data

In this study we focused on empowering RadLex with an ontological framework and additional content derived from the Foundational Model of Anatomy Ontology1 thereby providing RadLex the facility to correlate the different standards used in annotating neuroradiological image data. The objective of this work is to promote data sharing, data harmonization and interoperability between disparate neuroradiological labeling systems

Isolation of Primary Canine Satellite Cells

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a debilitating disease that principally affects striated muscles (skeletal and cardiac) and is the most severe form of muscular dystrophy. Disruption of the dystrophin gene is the primary cause of disease leading to excessive muscle damage. Regenerative processes counterbalance damage but individuals with DMD eventually succumb to immobilizing loss of strength and death from cardiac and pulmonary complications in their late teens and twenties. Golden retriever muscular dystrophy (GRMD) is a large animal model with better mimicry of the human disease than mouse models. Its development and characterization are critical to developing therapies for DMD. The cells primarily responsible for the regenerative response in skeletal muscle are satellite cells. These cells have been characterized at the protein level previously with only minor differences found between normal and dystrophic cultures. However, satellite cells have not been characterized at the transcriptional level. Pax7, MyoD, Myogenin and Utrophin act as critical members in the path to myogenesis. In this work, we have looked at the mRNA variation in cells collected from normal and GRMD animals and found substantial differences in mRNA expression profiles. These finding are also reflected in cell fusion experiments done on the same cultures. Studying these proteins and mRNAs in vitro under growth and differentiating conditions can help characterize satellite cells in the GRMD model. To sort through the heterogeneity of satellite cell populations, clonal cultures are needed to better characterize protein and mRNA patterns in these cells. Methods such as limiting dilution or flow cytometry require considerable time and resources to clone and verify large numbers of colonies for analysis. Micropallet array technology is a cell sorting method that permits clonal culture of large numbers of cells in very small spaces. Employing its flexible nature, micropallet array technology has been adapted to culture primary satellite cells from the GRMD model. Using these adaptations, clonal colonies have been cultured and shown to proliferate on tri-partite micropallet arrays. This forms two sister colonies where one sister colony can be analyzed and the other reserved for continued culture and downstream experiments

A stochastic spectral analysis of transcriptional regulatory cascades

The past decade has seen great advances in our understanding of the role of noise in gene regulation and the physical limits to signaling in biological networks. Here we introduce the spectral method for computation of the joint probability distribution over all species in a biological network. The spectral method exploits the natural eigenfunctions of the master equation of birth-death processes to solve for the joint distribution of modules within the network, which then inform each other and facilitate calculation of the entire joint distribution. We illustrate the method on a ubiquitous case in nature: linear regulatory cascades. The efficiency of the method makes possible numerical optimization of the input and regulatory parameters, revealing design properties of, e.g., the most informative cascades. We find, for threshold regulation, that a cascade of strong regulations converts a unimodal input to a bimodal output, that multimodal inputs are no more informative than bimodal inputs, and that a chain of up-regulations outperforms a chain of down-regulations. We anticipate that this numerical approach may be useful for modeling noise in a variety of small network topologies in biology

Lightweight XML-based query, integration and visualization of distributed, multimodality brain imaging data

A need of many neuroimaging researchers is to integrate multimodality brain data that may be stored in separate databases. To address this need we have developed a framework that provides a uniform XML-based query interface across multiple online data sources. The development of this framework is driven by the need to integrate neurosurgical and neuroimaging data related to language. The data sources for the language studies are 1) a web-accessible relational database of neurosurgical cortical stimulation mapping data (CSM) that includes patient-specific 3-D coordinates of each stimulation site mapped to an MRI reconstruction of the patient brain surface; and 2) an XML database of fMRI and structural MRI data and analysis results, created automatically by a batch program we have embedded in SPM. To make these sources available for querying each is wrapped as an XML view embedded in a web service. A top level web application accepts distributed XQueries over the sources, which are dispatched to the underlying web services. Returned results can be displayed as XML, HTML, CSV (Excel format), a 2-D schematic of a parcellated brain, or a 3-D brain visualization. In the latter case the CSM patient-specific coordinates returned by the query are sent to a transformation web-service for conversion to normalized space, after which they are sent to our 3-D visualization program MindSeer, which is accessed via Java WebStart through a generated link. The anatomical distribution of pooled CSM sites can then be visualized using various surfaces derived from brain atlases. As this framework is further developed and generalized we believe it will have appeal for researchers who wish to query, integrate and visualize results across their own databases as well as those of collaborators

A Generic Surface Sampler for Monte Carlo Simulations

We present an implementation of a Monte Carlo algorithm that generates points randomly and uniformly on a set of arbitrary surfaces. The algorithm is completely general and only requires the geometry modeling software to provide the intersection points of an arbitrary line with the surface being sampled. We demonstrate the algorithm using the Geant4 Monte Carlo simulation toolkit. The efficiency of the sampling algorithm is discussed, along with various options in the implementation and example applications