Oral History Interview: Floyd H. Stark

This interview is one of a series conducted concerning West Virginia communities, focusing on Ceredo. At the time of the interview, Mr. Floyd H. Stark was a bank president. He discusses: the history of the bank; individuals such as Mose Napier; the city of Ceredo (including beautification, businesses, economics, & young people leaving the city); the economic recession; Rocco\u27s Restaurant; and a brief section on his service in the military.https://mds.marshall.edu/oral_history/1300/thumbnail.jp

Mass calibration of distant SPT galaxy clusters through expanded weak-lensing follow-up observations with HST, VLT, & Gemini-South

Expanding from previous work, we present weak-lensing (WL) measurements for a total sample of 30 distant (zmedian = 0.93) massive galaxy clusters from the South Pole Telescope Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SPT-SZ) Survey, measuring galaxy shapes in Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Advanced Camera for Surveys images. We remove cluster members and preferentially select z 73 1.4 background galaxies via V - I colour, employing deep photometry from VLT/FORS2 and Gemini-South/GMOS. We apply revised calibrations for the WL shape measurements and the source redshift distribution to estimate the cluster masses. In combination with earlier Magellan/Megacam results for lower-redshifts clusters, we infer refined constraints on the scaling relation between the SZ detection significance and the cluster mass, in particular regarding its redshift evolution. The mass scale inferred from the WL data is lower by a factor $0.76^{+0.10}_{-0.14}$ (at our pivot redshift z = 0.6) compared to what would be needed to reconcile a flat Planck \u3bd\u39bCDM cosmology (in which the sum of the neutrino masses is a free parameter) with the observed SPT-SZ cluster counts. In order to sensitively test the level of (dis-)agreement between SPT clusters and Planck, further expanded WL follow-up samples are needed

Network-Based Pipeline for Analyzing MS Data: An Application toward Liver Cancer

10.1021/pr1010845Journal of Proteome Research1052261-2272JPRO

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agents for tumor diagnosis

10.1260/2040-2295.4.1.23Journal of Healthcare Engineering4123-4

DNA Repair in Human Pluripotent Stem Cells Is Distinct from That in Non-Pluripotent Human Cells

The potential for human disease treatment using human pluripotent stem cells, including embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), also carries the risk of added genomic instability. Genomic instability is most often linked to DNA repair deficiencies, which indicates that screening/characterization of possible repair deficiencies in pluripotent human stem cells should be a necessary step prior to their clinical and research use. In this study, a comparison of DNA repair pathways in pluripotent cells, as compared to those in non-pluripotent cells, demonstrated that DNA repair capacities of pluripotent cell lines were more heterogeneous than those of differentiated lines examined and were generally greater. Although pluripotent cells had high DNA repair capacities for nucleotide excision repair, we show that ultraviolet radiation at low fluxes induced an apoptotic response in these cells, while differentiated cells lacked response to this stimulus, and note that pluripotent cells had a similar apoptotic response to alkylating agent damage. This sensitivity of pluripotent cells to damage is notable since viable pluripotent cells exhibit less ultraviolet light-induced DNA damage than do differentiated cells that receive the same flux. In addition, the importance of screening pluripotent cells for DNA repair defects was highlighted by an iPSC line that demonstrated a normal spectral karyotype, but showed both microsatellite instability and reduced DNA repair capacities in three out of four DNA repair pathways examined. Together, these results demonstrate a need to evaluate DNA repair capacities in pluripotent cell lines, in order to characterize their genomic stability, prior to their pre-clinical and clinical use