Microbe Hunters: Searching for Anammox Bacteria in the Tennessee Aquarium

Ammonium and nitrite are toxic metabolic waste products generated by aquatic macroorganisms. They are of particular concern in closed systems, such as commercial aquaria. Typically, biological filtration systems are employed to regulate levels of toxic N species as they are more cost-efficient compared to water removal and replacement. Microbial communities that reside in these systems play vital roles in transformation of toxic N species. Commonly, nitrite and ammonium are converted into nitrate via nitrification. However, even nitrate is toxic at higher concentrations. Bacteria belonging to the phylum Planctomycetes can transform ammonium and nitrite to N2 via anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox). In this study, we are investigating the presence and role of anammox bacteria in multiple tanks at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, TN. DNA was extracted from water and filtration systems of four different aquaria. Metagenomic analyses, looking for the presence of genes diagnostic of the anammox reaction, were performed and no known annamox pathway-specific genes were identified. Given the typically low representation of Planctomycetes in microbial communities, a nested PCR approach targeting Planctomycete-specific16S rRNA genes was used to enrich for and identify organisms capable of anammox. Analysis using this targeted PCR approach is ongoing

Field Epidemiology and Laboratory Training Programs in sub-Saharan Africa from 2004 to 2010: need, the process, and prospects

As of 2010 sub-Saharan Africa had approximately 865 million inhabitants living with numerous public health challenges. Several public health initiatives [e.g., the United States (US) President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the US President’s Malaria Initiative] have been very successful at reducing mortality from priority diseases. A competently trained public health workforce that can operate multi-disease surveillance and response systems is necessary to build upon and sustain these successes and to address other public health problems. Sub-Saharan Africa appears to have weathered the recent global economic downturn remarkably well and its increasing middle class may soon demand stronger public health systems to protect communities. The Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) program of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been the backbone of public health surveillance and response in the US during its 60 years of existence. EIS has been adapted internationally to create the Field Epidemiology Training Program (FETP) in several countries. In the 1990s CDC and the Rockefeller Foundation collaborated with the Uganda and Zimbabwe ministries of health and local universities to create 2-year Public Health Schools Without Walls (PHSWOWs) which were based on the FETP model. In 2004 the FETP model was further adapted to create the Field Epidemiology and Laboratory Training Program (FELTP) in Kenya to conduct joint competencybased training for field epidemiologists and public health laboratory scientists providing a master’s degree to participants upon completion. The FELTP model has been implemented in several additional countries in sub-Saharan Africa. By the end of 2010 these 10 FELTPs and two PHSWOWs covered 613 million of the 865 million people in sub-Saharan Africa and had enrolled 743 public health professionals. We describe the process that we used to develop 10 FELTPs covering 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa from 2004 to 2010 as a strategy to develop a locally trained public health workforce that can operate multi-disease surveillance and response systems.Key words: Field epidemiology, laboratory management, multi-disease surveillance and response systems, public health workforce capacity buildin

The happy fall: Lamentation and digression in the modern French text.

Whereas any signification is characterized by Saussure's distinction between the signifier and the signified, this difference is conventionally represented as a lack or insufficiency of the signifying system even as its productivity is demonstrated in its own textual enunciation. The translation of literary texts, as an act of imitation that cannot reproduce the specificity of the original, is haunted by a sense of linguistic lack. Similarly, in Lacanian signification, one is doubly split because of difference: as both a signifying and a desiring subject, one is haunted by the impossibility of recuperation of the originary fullness of the prelapsarian sign which is promised by the phallus as the privileged signifier. The presupposition of the lamentation is that language could be other than a signifying system inhabited by difference. To produce the lament is to posit the possibility of a sign that is never different from itself. Hence, it is to posit a language that could "do justice" to the intended meaning of the subject. However, the lament of difference is always complicated by difference itself. The lamenting subjects in Baudelaire's "Le Cygne" and Mallarme's "Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui" can do nothing other than affirm their exile from the originary in the very production of the lament, since it can only be articulated from within difference. That difference can be understood not only as a lamentable lack but also as the condition of the productivity of discourse is demonstrated by Robert Desnos's Rrose Selavy in which resignifying practices occur that produce new meanings in a "digression" from the signifier of a pre-existing discourse. The digressing subject enacts signification seemingly toward no communicated end but rather to discover the other significations that always haunt discourse. My reading of Desnos's La Liberte ou l'amour! and Deuil pour deuil suggests a rethinking of such concepts as the signifying subject, which is always split in the conventional perspective, and such distinctions as that of originality and imitation to imply the inevitable citationality of discourse.Ph.D.Romance Languages and Literatures: FrenchUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103574/1/9332051.pdfDescription of 9332051.pdf : Restricted to UM users only