Exploiting the benefits of probiotics for intestinal disease diagnosis and therapy

Probiotics are live microorganisms that can confer health benefits to the host. They have long been consumed through fermented foods. While the specific mechanisms of probiotics are largely unclear, there is evidence that their beneficial effects may be attributed to the microbes’ ability to modify the gastrointestinal (GI) environment, to modulate host immune response, or to produce natural products that directly inhibit pathogens in the gut. With the increasing awareness of the important functions that the gut microbiota plays in affecting host heath, probiotics may no longer just stay as simple dietary supplements, but become a promising approach to disease management. With recent advances in synthetic biology, novel functions can be introduced into these “good” microbes to provide additional benefits. Genetically engineered bacteria have been developed to specifically target pathogens or effectively deliver therapeutics to the GI tract. However, there are significant limitations to the existing systems developed. For example, the engineered pathogen sensors largely rely on the similarity between the host and the pathogens, the therapeutics delivery systems are usually constrained by the molecular structures, and the majority of the works have been limited to laboratory settings. In this dissertation, I present a system we have developed based on a food-grade probiotic, Lactococcus lactis, and demonstrate a synthetic biology methodology that could be applied to build biosensors of other pathogens or environmental signals, as well as a generalizable peptide delivery vehicle to the GI tract. I will present my work in three parts. (1) The discovery of an effective antagonistic effect of L. lactis against the infectious diarrheal disease cholera, and elucidation of the mechanism with an infant mouse model. (2) The development of a diagnostic circuit in L. lacits that enables in situ detection of the pathogen and easy readout through fecal sample analysis. (3) The design of a generalizable therapeutic peptide delivery system utilizing the endogenous secretion pathway of L. lacits. Overall, my work exploits the natural and engineered benefits of the probiotic L. lactis and demonstrates its use in the intestinal disease diagnosis and therapy.2019-02-20T00:00:00

Impact of Psychological Needs on Luxury Consumption

This paper examines the impact of psychological needs on luxury consumption. Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) invented the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe luxury goods and services, in which Veblen indicated the purpose of luxury consumption was to display wealth and social status. This paper integrates the following two papers: (1) Han and Zhou (2002), who proposed an integrative model, and argued that three variables, namely Country-of-Origin, Brand Name, and Price, were major predictors for overall product evaluation and purchase intentions; and (2) Han, Nunes and Dreze (2010), who proposed a taxonomy called The Luxury 4Ps, to explain the inductive and deductive psychological needs of luxury consumption

Re-Opening the Silk Road to Transform Chinese Trade

Under anti-globalization and isolationism, China is seeking to portray itself as a new leader for globalization under the banner of the Silk Road initiative. Meanwhile, China's traditional and comparatively advantaged industry, silk, has faced dire predicaments and challenges for long time, and needs a transformation in terms of initiatives. Throughout history, the prosperity arising from silk was supposed to represent a microcosm of Chinese society. This paper searches the breakthrough point to improve the current dilemma of Chinese silk enterprises; uses a Case Study for inductive reasoning that is feasible for marketing strategies; and provides a strategy to help Chinese silk enterprises to transform their market positioning and operating modes to obtain better development opportunities. The paper also analyzes the new external environment based on the "One Belt, One Road" principle, which is of crucial importance for the implementation of new marketing strategies

Study of Evolution Model of China Education and Research Network

By searching the hyperlinks with domain name “.edu.cn” which constitutes the China Education and Research Network, we build a complex directed network containing 366,422 web pages containing 540,755 URLs. These URLs constitute a complex directed network through self-organization. By analyzing the topology of China Education and Research Network, we found that it is different from the common Internet in several aspects. Most of the vertices have incoming links, a few vertices have outgoing links, and very few vertices have both incoming and outgoing links. The vertex distribution has a power-law tail. A large proportion of newly added edges always connect with those pages selected from one subnetwork that they belong to, instead of connecting with the pages selected from the whole network. According to these features, we presented the evolution model of this complex directed network. The results indicate that this model reflects some main characteristics of China Education and Research Network

Re-Opening the Silk Road to Transform Chinese Trade

Under anti-globalization and isolationism, China is seeking to portray itself as a new leader for globalization under the banner of the Silk Road initiative. Meanwhile, China’s traditional and comparatively advantaged industry, silk, has faced dire predicaments and challenges for long time, and needs a transformation in terms of initiatives. Throughout history, the prosperity arising from silk was supposed to represent a microcosm of Chinese society. This paper searches the breakthrough point to improve the current dilemma of Chinese silk enterprises; uses a Case Study for inductive reasoning that is feasible for marketing strategies; and provides a strategy to help Chinese silk enterprises to transform their market positioning and operating modes to obtain better development opportunities. The paper also analyzes the new external environment based on the “One Belt, One Road” principle, which is of crucial importance for the implementation of new marketing strategies