Investigating the Roles of Lhx1a, Lhx1b, and Lhx5 in Zebrafish Spinal Cord Interneuron Specification and Function

Located in the vertebral column, the human spine is responsible for regulating body movements and receiving sensory input about pain and touch. Currently, few treatments for neurological diseases and spinal cord injuries exist, partly because we know little about how a fully functioning spinal cord is constructed. As such, studying spinal cord development, specifically neuronal specification and patterning, should be useful for developing better treatments for people with spinal cord injuries and diseases. Zebrafish are a prime model organism for studying neuronal specification because their transparent embryos develop outside the mother, allowing us to easily examine gene expression, cell movements and cell morphology during development . Furthermore, the zebrafish spinal cord has few types of interneurons compared to mammals, and each interneuron type can be recognized by its distinct morphology. I focused on V1 cells, which form in the ventral spinal cord and are functionally similar in all vertebrates. In zebrafish, V1 cells develop into CiAs, or Cicumferential Ascending interneurons, which control movement and sensory gating. Several transcription factors are expressed consistently in all vertebrate V1 cells, and my research focused on Lhx1a, Lhx1b and Lhx5. As a result of findings in mice, I predicted that knocking down these transcription factors would result in neurotransmitter deficits and potentially compromise movement ability. Additionally, a main focus of my project became assaying various experimental strategies for knocking-down Lhx1a, Lhx1b and Lhx5. These included injecting reagents into 1-4 cell stage embryos and taking advantage of a lhx1b mutant fish line. For the injections, I used morpholinos (MOs), antisense agents that either interfere with RNA transcription to protein or with RNA splicing. I also used RNA constructs which should act as either dominant activators or dominant repressors. Using in situ hybridization, I then tried to assess the impact on neurotransmitters throughout the spinal cord and specifically within CiAs. I successfully identified a PCR and restriction enzyme digest method for identifying lhx1b mutants. This was exciting as it was a completely novel method for identifying these fish. Furthermore, my results demonstrated that homozygous lhx1b mutants are viable which was previously unknown. My injection results demonstrate that lhx1b and lhx5 splice-blocking MOs are also an effective tool for knocking-down the function of these two genes. In contrast, the lhx1a MOs that I tried were not effective. My RNA injection results were inconclusive and I determined that a higher concentration was probably needed to impact Lhx1 and Lhx5 function

Mission and data operations IBM 360 user's guide

The M and DO computer systems are introduced and supplemented. The hardware and software status is discussed, along with standard processors and user libraries. Data management techniques are presented, as well as machine independence, debugging facilities, and overlay considerations

To “Opt Out” Go to Court: How the Public Nuisance Doctrine Can Solve the Robotext Circuit Split and Support Plaintiffs

Text messaging is now one of the predominant modes of communication. Because of this popularity, businesses and fraudsters alike are now consistently communicating with and targeting consumers by text, leading to an uncountable amount of unsolicited text messages. Courts across the country are grappling with how to remedy a wide range of injuries resulting from these messages. As outlined in Article III of the Constitution and later clarified by the Supreme Court in Spokeo v. Robins, to bring a case in federal court, plaintiffs must assert standing. With unsolicited text messages impacting millions of Americans, adequately asserting standing proves to be a significant hurdle. This note argues that plaintiffs will find the best success through use of the public nuisance doctrine’s special injury rule. The special injury rule allows plaintiffs who experience injuries similar to those suffered by the general public to recover so long as they can show that their injury differs from the injury to the general public in a specific way. Not only will this solution provide aggrieved plaintiffs with a route toward recovery, but it will also ensure that the federal court system continues to run smoothly in a time where unsolicited text messages are becoming increasingly harmful

Children’s Inferences about Relative Age as a Result of Power Comprehension

Honors (Bachelor's)PsychologyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112084/1/abalakir.pd

AI-enabled biomanufacturing

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Dressing Up: Religion and Ethnicity in Israeli National Dolls

This article considers Israel’s national image both at home and abroad through the framework of Israeli costume dolls, looking specifically at the way that gender played a role in Israel’s national image as it travelled from domestic production to international reception. Initially, predominantly female doll makers produced three main types of Israeli dolls, but over time the religious Eastern European male doll triumphed in the pantheon of national types. Produced for retail sale to non-Hebrew speaking tourists by immigrant woman, the Eastern European religious male doll came to represent Israel abroad while the market pushed representations of the Middle Eastern Jewish woman and the native sabra child to the side-lines. This article examines the shift from the multi-ethnic collection of dolls as representative of the nation’s idea of itself to the privileging of the male Eastern European doll as representative of the normative image of Israel abroad

Entropy of a bit-shift channel

We consider a simple transformation (coding) of an iid source called a bit-shift channel. This simple transformation occurs naturally in magnetic or optical data storage. The resulting process is not Markov of any order. We discuss methods of computing the entropy of the transformed process, and study some of its properties.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/074921706000000293 in the IMS Lecture Notes--Monograph Series (http://www.imstat.org/publications/lecnotes.htm) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Trigonometric Quadrature Fourier Features for Scalable Gaussian Process Regression

Fourier feature approximations have been successfully applied in the literature for scalable Gaussian Process (GP) regression. In particular, Quadrature Fourier Features (QFF) derived from Gaussian quadrature rules have gained popularity in recent years due to their improved approximation accuracy and better calibrated uncertainty estimates compared to Random Fourier Feature (RFF) methods. However, a key limitation of QFF is that its performance can suffer from well-known pathologies related to highly oscillatory quadrature, resulting in mediocre approximation with limited features. We address this critical issue via a new Trigonometric Quadrature Fourier Feature (TQFF) method, which uses a novel non-Gaussian quadrature rule specifically tailored for the desired Fourier transform. We derive an exact quadrature rule for TQFF, along with kernel approximation error bounds for the resulting feature map. We then demonstrate the improved performance of our method over RFF and Gaussian QFF in a suite of numerical experiments and applications, and show the TQFF enjoys accurate GP approximations over a broad range of length-scales using fewer features