The Rise and Fall of the Fighters: Colonial Korean Exiles in China

This thesis mainly aims to examine colonial masculinity, especially focusing on the national fighters for Korean independence during the Japanese colonial period. As China was a place that Korean exiles moved to, through an examination of Korean short stories by Chu Yosŏp, Sim Hun, and Kim Kwangju, this thesis traces back to the rise and fall of Korean exiles in China who participated in political movements during the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1920s, male intellectual characters in stories by Chu Yosŏp, and Sim Hun expressed their pride as national fighters while participating in Korean exile groups in Shanghai. The male character’s identity as an aggressive fighter was based on gender disparity between men as national leaders and women as objects belonging to the male leaders. Following China\u27s declaration of war against Japan in the 1930s, in the stories of Kim Kwangju, the previous activists disappeared. The failed dream converted revolutionaries from fierce nationalists and socialists into opium addicts, gamblers, and prisoners. A subsequent generation, younger than the previous fighters, decried the moral collapse of their fathers and teachers and lamented the hopeless period. Along with following Korean colonial men’s revelation of masculinity, considered to be their most important identity, this thesis also focuses on how it was suspended, contaminated, and extinguished as Japanese imperialism expanded to China

Multi-omics integration accurately predicts cellular state in unexplored conditions for Escherichia coli.

A significant obstacle in training predictive cell models is the lack of integrated data sources. We develop semi-supervised normalization pipelines and perform experimental characterization (growth, transcriptional, proteome) to create Ecomics, a consistent, quality-controlled multi-omics compendium for Escherichia coli with cohesive meta-data information. We then use this resource to train a multi-scale model that integrates four omics layers to predict genome-wide concentrations and growth dynamics. The genetic and environmental ontology reconstructed from the omics data is substantially different and complementary to the genetic and chemical ontologies. The integration of different layers confers an incremental increase in the prediction performance, as does the information about the known gene regulatory and protein-protein interactions. The predictive performance of the model ranges from 0.54 to 0.87 for the various omics layers, which far exceeds various baselines. This work provides an integrative framework of omics-driven predictive modelling that is broadly applicable to guide biological discovery

The Computational Diet: A Review of Computational Methods Across Diet, Microbiome, and Health.

Food and human health are inextricably linked. As such, revolutionary impacts on health have been derived from advances in the production and distribution of food relating to food safety and fortification with micronutrients. During the past two decades, it has become apparent that the human microbiome has the potential to modulate health, including in ways that may be related to diet and the composition of specific foods. Despite the excitement and potential surrounding this area, the complexity of the gut microbiome, the chemical composition of food, and their interplay in situ remains a daunting task to fully understand. However, recent advances in high-throughput sequencing, metabolomics profiling, compositional analysis of food, and the emergence of electronic health records provide new sources of data that can contribute to addressing this challenge. Computational science will play an essential role in this effort as it will provide the foundation to integrate these data layers and derive insights capable of revealing and understanding the complex interactions between diet, gut microbiome, and health. Here, we review the current knowledge on diet-health-gut microbiota, relevant data sources, bioinformatics tools, machine learning capabilities, as well as the intellectual property and legislative regulatory landscape. We provide guidance on employing machine learning and data analytics, identify gaps in current methods, and describe new scenarios to be unlocked in the next few years in the context of current knowledge

Anomalous QBO influence in the long period Kelvin waves in the low latitude mesosphere and lower thermosphere region over Kolhapur (16.7N, 74.2E)

15th MST Radar WorkshopSession M6: Middle atmosphere dynamics and structureMay 31 (Wed), NIPR Auditoriu

Increased power of mixed models facilitates association mapping of 10 loci for metabolic traits in an isolated population

The potential benefits of using population isolates in genetic mapping, such as reduced genetic, phenotypic and environmental heterogeneity, are offset by the challenges posed by the large amounts of direct and cryptic relatedness in these populations confounding basic assumptions of independence. We have evaluated four representative specialized methods for association testing in the presence of relatedness; (i) within-family (ii) within- and between-family and (iii) mixed-models methods, using simulated traits for 2906 subjects with known genome-wide genotype data from an extremely isolated population, the Island of Kosrae, Federated States of Micronesia. We report that mixed models optimally extract association information from such samples, demonstrating 88% power to rank the true variant as among the top 10 genome-wide with 56% achieving genome-wide significance, a >80% improvement over the other methods, and demonstrate that population isolates have similar power to non-isolate populations for observing variants of known effects. We then used the mixed-model method to reanalyze data for 17 published phenotypes relating to metabolic traits and electrocardiographic measures, along with another 8 previously unreported. We replicate nine genome-wide significant associations with known loci of plasma cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein, low-density lipoprotein, triglycerides, thyroid stimulating hormone, homocysteine, C-reactive protein and uric acid, with only one detected in the previous analysis of the same traits. Further, we leveraged shared identity-by-descent genetic segments in the region of the uric acid locus to fine-map the signal, refining the known locus by a factor of 4. Finally, we report a novel associations for height (rs17629022, P< 2.1 × 10−8

Non-invasive digital etching of van der Waals semiconductors

The capability to finely tailor material thickness with simultaneous atomic precision and non-invasivity would be useful for constructing quantum platforms and post-Moore microelectronics. However, it remains challenging to attain synchronized controls over tailoring selectivity and precision. Here we report a protocol that allows for non-invasive and atomically digital etching of van der Waals transition-metal dichalcogenides through selective alloying via low-temperature thermal diffusion and subsequent wet etching. The mechanism of selective alloying between sacrifice metal atoms and defective or pristine dichalcogenides is analyzed with high-resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy. Also, the non-invasive nature and atomic level precision of our etching technique are corroborated by consistent spectral, crystallographic and electrical characterization measurements. The low-temperature charge mobility of as-etched MoS$_2$ reaches up to $1200\,$cm$^{2}\cdot$V$^{-1}\cdot$s$^{-1}$, comparable to that of exfoliated pristine counterparts. The entire protocol represents a highly precise and non-invasive tailoring route for material manipulation.Comment: 46 pages, 4 figures, with S

Non-invasive digital etching of van der Waals semiconductors

The capability to finely tailor material thickness with simultaneous atomic precision and non-invasivity would be useful for constructing quantum platforms and post-Moore microelectronics. However, it remains challenging to attain synchronized controls over tailoring selectivity and precision. Here we report a protocol that allows for non-invasive and atomically digital etching of van der Waals transition-metal dichalcogenides through selective alloying via low-temperature thermal diffusion and subsequent wet etching. The mechanism of selective alloying between sacrifice metal atoms and defective or pristine dichalcogenides is analyzed with high-resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy. Also, the non-invasive nature and atomic level precision of our etching technique are corroborated by consistent spectral, crystallographic, and electrical characterization measurements. The low-temperature charge mobility of as-etched MoS2 reaches up to 1200 cm2 V−1s−1, comparable to that of exfoliated pristine counterparts. The entire protocol represents a highly precise and non-invasive tailoring route for material manipulation

Understanding the Formation and Mechanism of Anticipatory Responses in Escherichia coli

Microorganisms often live in complex habitats, where changes in the environment are predictable, providing an opportunity for microorganisms to learn, anticipate the upcoming environmental changes and prepare in advance for better survival and growth. One such environment is the mammalian intestine, where the abundance of different carbon sources is spatially distributed. In this study, we identified seven spatially distributed carbon sources in the mammalian intestine and tested whether Escherichia coli exhibits phenotypes that are consistent with an anticipatory response given their spatial order and abundance within the mammalian intestine. Through RNA-Seq and RT-PCR validation measurements, we found that there was a 67% match in the expression patterns between the measured phenotypes and what would otherwise be expected in the case of anticipatory behavior, while 83% and 0% were in agreement with the homeostatic and random response, respectively. To understand the genetic and phenotypic basis of the discrepancies between the expected and measured anticipatory responses, we thoroughly investigated the discrepancy in D-galactose treatment and the expression of maltose operon in E. coli. Here, the expected anticipatory response, based on the spatial distribution of D-galactose and D-maltose, was that D-galactose should upregulate the maltose operon, but it was the opposite in experimental validation. We performed whole genome random mutagenesis and screening and identified E. coli strains with positive expression of maltose operon in D-galactose. Targeted Sanger sequencing and mutation repair identified that the mutations in the promoter region of malT and in the coding region of the crp gene were the factors responsible for the reversion in the association. Further, to identify why positive association in the D-galactose treatment and the expression of the maltose operon did not evolve naturally, fitness measurements were performed. Fitness experiments demonstrated that the fitness of E. coli strains with a positive association in the D-galactose treatment and the expression of the maltose operon was 12% to 20% lower than that of the wild type strain