Data and the Human

Syllabus, course schedule, and major assignments for "Data and the Human" (HON 202-006), an interdisciplinary honors seminar offered in Fall 2020 at NC State University

Interpretive Machines

This syllabus describes an interdisciplinary course for first-year students in the NC State University Honors program in Fall 2015. "Interpretive Machines" offers a historically ranging, critically intensive, and hands-on learning environment about the technologies by which humans transmit our cultural inheritance and ideas. The course also extensively involves the NCSU Libraries including bookbinding and final prototyping projects in the Makerspace

Access, Computational Analysis, and Fair Use in the Digitized Nineteenth- Century Press

This essay looks to the near history of copyright, commercially licensed resources, and fair use that shapes digital scholarship on nineteenth-century periodicals today. Using the digitization of British Library newspapers as a case study, I demonstrate how arguments about access to public domain materials do not fully account for the complex international landscape of rights and exceptions for digital periodicals resources. This landscape is also changing with the emergence of legal exceptions for computational research methods like text and data mining. These methods may point to new forms of scholarly communication, particularly "transformative uses" that work around the restrictive vestiges of copyright law. Ultimately, this essay claims that scholars need to understand the changing parameters of copyright, not simply as a set of rules that affects their day-to-day work but as an opportunity to shape the law and advocate for creative forms of research and scholarly communication

Reading Literature in the Digital Age

This syllabus describes a first-year interdisciplinary honors course undertaken in fall 2014 at NC State University. It welcomes students into a hands-on environment for thinking about and practicing with new and old platforms for reading, interpretation, and understanding. It attempts to bridge book history and digital humanities into an accessible undergraduate experience

Lack of association between the rs2294008 polymorphism in the prostate stem cell antigen gene and colorectal neoplasia : a case-control and immunohistochemical study

PMID: 22824379 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] PMCID: PMC3500224 Free PMC ArticlePeer reviewedPublisher PD

Biophysical investigations of photosynthetic reaction centres from Rhodobacter sphaeroides

Site-directed mutagenesis was used to produce a series of mutant reaction centres from the purple bacterium Rb. sphaeroides. These mutants were investigated using a combination of functional assays and X- ray crystallography in order to correlate structure/function relationships. In particular the effect of the protein environment on the carotenoid pigment in the reaction complex has been investigated. The carotenoid is held within a largely hydrophobic pocket within the reaction centre complex, assuming a twisted 15,15' cis conformation. A small number of polar amino acid residues are positioned towards one end, forming almost a ring around the pigment molecule. Each of these amino acids was replaced with a non-polar residue of an approximately similar size: Trp M115-Phe, Ser M119-Ala, Met M122-Leu, Trp M157-Phe and Tyr M177-Phe. The mutant reaction centres were expressed in a background lacking light-harvesting complexes, permitting observation of the spectral characteristics of the complex in the bacterial cell and chromatophores. A range of techniques were then applied to attempt to identify the effects of the mutations on the reaction centre carotenoid. One additional mutant complex was investigated, in which an amino acid in close proximity to the BChl special pair was mutated (Phe to Arg M197). Limited investigation of this mutant complex had already identified altered spectral characteristics, although the precise mechanism by which this spectral shift was produced by the mutation was unclear. The investigations performed fell into three groups. The initial focus was concentrated on establishing whether the mutant reaction centre complexes were still being properly assembled by the bacteria. To this end, the ability of the bacteria to insert complexes into the membrane, the stability of the complexes upon removal from the membrane, and the ratio of pigments bound within the complex were determined. The second group of investigations utilised specialised spectroscopic techniques. Circular dichroism studies showed that the carotenoid was apparently binding in a similar fashion in the mutant and wild-type complexes, and that the blue-shifted P band in the absorption spectra of RM197 strains was also manifested in the CD spectra. ESR was the final spectroscopic technique utilised. It was used to investigate the ability of the various RC complexes to transfer the triplet energy from BChl to carotenoid. All the carotenoid binding site mutants returned wild-type signals. However, those carrying the RM197 mutation showed marked differences from the wild-type. The mutation at RM197 affected the values of the ESR field splitting parameters, and allowed the triplet energy to be transferred at temperatures much lower than that determined for the wild-type. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)

Coronary sinus sampling of cytokines after heart transplantation: Evidence for macrophage activation and interleukin-4 production within the graft

AbstractObjectives. This study was undertaken to evaluate the organ-specific release of cytokines after heart transplantation and to assess any correlation with transplant rejection. This cytokine profile should document the relative activation of mononuclear cell subsets within the graft.Background. Up to 60% of mononuclear cell infiltrating the cardiac allograft during rejection are macrophages, but their rote is undetermined. The T lymphocytes are activated, but the activity of specific T cell subsets is not known. We sought to assess for the first time in humans the in vivo activation of mononuclear cell subsets by measuring coronary sinus cytokine levels after heart transplantation.Methods. Palred superior vena cava and coronary sinus serum samples were assayed for interkeukin (IL)-2, IL-4 and IL-6, soluble IL-2 receptors, tumor necrosis factor-alpha and neopterin in 10 patients at the time of 40 routine endomyocardial biopsy procedures. All cytokine measurements were made by using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay; neopterin was measured by using radioimmunoassy.Results. Interleukin-2 levels were not detectable (<0.8 U/ml) in either the superior vena cava or the coronary sinus in the presence or absence of rejection. Interleukin-2 receptor levels were uniformly elevated to 1,283 U/ml in the superior vena cava and to 1,232 U/ml in the coronary sinus, with no correlation with rejection severity. Interleukin-4 levels were consistently higher in coronary sinus serum than in peripheral blood (229 vs. 61 pg/ml, p < O.0005), but there was no relation with rejection. Interleukin-6 levels were higher in the coronary sinus than in me superior vena cava (200 vs. 120 pg/mi, p < 0.05). Tumor necrosis factor-alpha showed consistently elevated levels in coronary sinus serum (68 vs. 17 pg/ml, p < 0.0005), with no relation with rejection. Neopterin, which is produced only by activated macro-phages, was also consistently elevated in the coronary sinus (2.5 vs. 2.2 nmol, p = 0.08).Conclusions. The cardiac allograft is a major source of cyto-kines after heart transplantation. The cytokine profile allows the activity of subsets of the mononuclear cell infiltrate to be investigated. Elevated coronary sinus activity of the macrophage specific metabolite neopterin suggests macrophage activation within the allograft. This possibility is supported by elevated coronary sinus levels of tumor necrosis factor-alpha and IL-6. The T lymphocytes are activated, as evidenced by high soluble IL-2 receptor levels, but IL-2 production was suppressed by conventional immunosup-pressive therapy. Coronary sinus IL-4 levels represent T helper-2 cell activation within the graft despite immunosuppression. We could find no temporal relation between the coronary sinus or superior vena cava cytokine concentration or profile and severity of rejection on concurrent biopsy studies

Synthesis of oxindoles and benozfuranones via oxidation of 2-heterocyclic BMIDAs

The synthesis of functionalized oxindoles and benzofuranones via oxidation of 2-BMIDA indoles and benzofurans, respectively, is described. Interconversion of boron species (BMIDAàBF3K) was necessary to enable oxidation and overcome boronic acid stability issues associated with a difficult BMIDA hydrolysis. Overall, a robust process was developed that allowed access to a small library of oxindole and benzofuranone products and facilitated the step-efficient synthesis of biologically-active compounds containing the oxindole pharmacophore