RNA-SEQ ANALYSIS OF TRANSGENIC ARABIDOPSIS THALIANA WITH CONFERRED OVERPRODUCTION OF PUTRESCENE BY A MOUSE ORNITHINE DECARBOXYLASE GENE

Polyamines are a class of low molecular weight, nitrogenous bases that participate in many important functions in plants, from germination to senescence and many steps in between. These molecules have been shown to play key roles in various abiotic and biotic stress responses which makes their biosynthetic pathway a focal point for engineering plants to better adapt to rapidly changing local environments and global climate change. Previous work with plants capable of producing high polyamine titers shows that they have superior stress responses as compared to their wild type counterparts. This study investigated what broader impacts a genetic manipulations to a basic metabolic pathway may have on the overall profile of gene expression of young plants of Arabidopsis thaliana. We investigated the effects of these transgenic changes, in model system A. thaliana, in plants with the conferred trait of polyamine overproduction, specifically putrescene, by way of transgenic manipulation using a mouse (Mus musculus) ornithine-decarboxylase (ODC) gene, which has been used extensively over the years for this purpose. Employing Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology, we compared the transcriptomic differences between wild type plants and those genetically engineered to live with high putrescine either constitutively or in response to short-term induction. Our results show that polyamine overproduction has wide-ranging impacts on not only the neighboring pathways of amino acids and their closely related sub-pathways but also plant growth regulator biosynthetic pathways (e.g., the abscisic acid metabolic pathway), specifically in relation to stimulating a stress response – even in the absence of a traditional stressor. This enhancement of polyamine biosynthesis and accumulation shows the promise of metabolic genetic engineering as a way to produce stress-tolerance in plants, and potentially increased nitrogen and carbon assimilation leading to higher biomass accumulation

Constituting Conservatism: The Goldwater/Paul Analog

Barry Goldwater’s 1960 campaign text The Conscience of a Conservative delivered a message of individual freedom and strictly limited government power in order to unite the fractured American conservative movement around a set of core principles. The coalition Goldwater helped constitute among libertarians, traditionalists, and anticommunists would dominate American politics for several decades. By 2008, however, the cracks in this edifice had become apparent, and the future of the movement was in clear jeopardy. That year, Ron Paul’s campaign text The Revolution: A Manifesto appeared, offering a broad vision of “freedom” strikingly similar to that of Goldwater, but differing in certain key ways. This book was an effort to reconstitute the conservative movement by expelling the hawkish descendants of the anticommunists and depicting the noninterventionist views of pre-Cold War conservatives like Robert Taft as the “true” conservative position. This dissertation employs rhetorical criticism in order to examine the precise persuasive functions of each of these texts. In contrast to theorists who have classified the works of Goldwater and Paul as instances of the “jeremiad,” this dissertation argues that the “jeremiad” is understood better as a “form” than as a “genre,” as the former refers to a discursively portrayed situation, and the latter indicates a rhetor’s perception of situation. It considers the two artifacts as “analogs” in an effort to rethink their generic classification. Rather than attempting to classify the works in toto, it applies Albert O. Hirschman’s work on “the rhetoric of reaction” in order to find and explain the implication of each author’s use of the “perversity,” “futility,” and “jeopardy” theses. This dissertation argues that a rhetoric that takes identification as its primary aim can also be profoundly persuasive, and that a humanistic approach is capable of articulating its persuasive content. By means of a criticism of two similar libertarian campaign texts from two different eras, it attempts to demonstrate that rhetoric’s instrumental and constitutive functions are both consistent and determinable by the tools of rhetorical theory and criticism

Global Journalist: Global perception of U.S.'s stance on Iraq War build-up

In this February 20, 2003 conversation on the Global Journalist, Stuart Loory interviews several journalists on the relations between the U.S. and Australia, the Netherlands, Japan, and Venezuela concerning the build-up toward the Iraq War. They discuss whether each country supports or opposes the U.S.'s position on the war, as well as internal controversaries occurring in the countries, such as Middle Eastern oil exports. Host: Stuart Loory. Guests: Ben English (Australia), Wendy Bronker (?) (Netherlands), Eric Due (Japan), Andrés Izarra (Venezuela). Producers: Sara Andrea Fajardo. Director: Pat Akers

Senior Recital: William Worthan, horn

This recital is presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degrees Bachelor of Music in Music Education and Bachelor of Music in Performance. Mr. Worthan studies horn with Jason Eklund.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/musicprograms/2200/thumbnail.jp

Genetic Variability in Developing Periodical Cicadas

There are few events in nature that are more predictable than the emergence of periodical cicadas. The insects emerge from the ground after 13 or 17 years (depending on brood and species) of development. Karlin et al., (1991) biochemically examined over 750 Magicicada tredecassini belonging to Brood XIX which emerged during the spring of 1985. In this study they found evidence for rapid deterioration of heterozygosity for two esterase loci,Gi-3-pdh and Gpi, and suggested that this deterioration may be related to differential mating classes. To test this hypothesis, we re-sampled from this same brood at the same location during fall (1993) and winter (1994), nine years into the 13 year development of this brood. The current biochemical data suggest no significant deviations from Hardy-Weinberg expectations for either Est-3, Gl-3- pdh or Pgm-1, but in several cases Est-1 or Est-2 displayed significant departures. Our failure to find excess heterozygosity in the nymphal sample is interpreted to support weakly the size-mediated mating system hypothesis