History of the South Dakota Crop Improvement Association

A history of the South Dakota Crop Improvement Association cannot be confined to only facts, dates, and personalities involved in the progress of an organization, but must embody the determined and arduous efforts of our forefathers evolving a stable and permanent agriculture for South Dakota. It also entails to some degree, the history of crop production in the state and suggests the evolution of many of our present day crop varieties and cultural practices. The importance of the work of our crop and soil scientists and the methods of disseminating their findings to the farmers is closely linked to the history of the Association. In order to keep the history in chronological order and simplify future additions, it has been arranged according to the Association’s yearly activities. A number of resolutions that were passed at annual meetings are quoted in the history to show the trend in the thinking of the leaders of the Association. It is quite evident that the interests of the leaders of the Association have always been exceedingly broad and covered many phases of agriculture. They were constantly striving for ways of improving research in agriculture and improving methods of informing farmers of the results of research. The resolutions show that occasionally the Association became over-zealous in world affairs outside of agriculture and it was necessary for the more astute members to guide the thinking back to agriculture with emphasis on crops and soils. Interest in postal rates and child labor laws are examples. Examples of the programs used at annual meetings also show a diversity of interests. These programs included outstanding men from all parts of the country. The emphasis was often on world economics and its effect on farm prices; also on cooperative marketing

An algorithmic method for functionally defining regions of interest in the ventral visual pathway

In a widely used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analysis method, functional regions of interest (fROIs) are handpicked in each participant using macroanatomic landmarks as guides, and the response of these regions to new conditions is then measured. A key limitation of this standard handpicked fROI method is the subjectivity of decisions about which clusters of activated voxels should be treated as the particular fROI in question in each subject. Here we apply the Group-Constrained Subject-Specific (GSS) method for defining fROIs, recently developed for identifying language fROIs (Fedorenko et al., 2010), to algorithmically identify fourteen well-studied category-selective regions of the ventral visual pathway (Kanwisher, 2010). We show that this method retains the benefit of defining fROIs in individual subjects without the subjectivity inherent in the traditional handpicked fROI approach. The tools necessary for using this method are available on our website (http://web.mit.edu/bcs/nklab/GSS.shtml).Ellison Medical Foundatio

Trastuzumab Sensitizes Ovarian Cancer Cells to EGFR-targeted Therapeutics

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Early studies have demonstrated comparable levels of HER2/ErbB2 expression in both breast and ovarian cancer. Trastuzumab (Herceptin), a therapeutic monoclonal antibody directed against HER2, is FDA-approved for the treatment of both early and late stage breast cancer. However, clinical studies of trastuzumab in epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) patients have not met the same level of success. Surprisingly, however, no reports have examined either the basis for primary trastuzumab resistance in ovarian cancer or potential ways of salvaging trastuzumab as a potential ovarian cancer therapeutic.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>An in vitro model of primary trastuzumab-resistant ovarian cancer was created by long-term culture of HER2-positive ovarian carcinoma-derived cell lines with trastuzumab. Trastuzumab treated vs. untreated parental cells were compared for HER receptor expression, trastuzumab sensitivity, and sensitivity to other HER-targeted therapeutics.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In contrast to widely held assumptions, here we show that ovarian cancer cells that are not growth inhibited by trastuzumab are still responsive to trastuzumab. Specifically, we show that responsiveness to alternative HER-targeted inhibitors, such as gefitinib and cetuximab, is dramatically potentiated by long-term trastuzumab treatment of ovarian cancer cells. HER2-positive ovarian carcinoma-derived cells are, therefore, not "unresponsive" to trastuzumab as previously assumed, even when they not growth inhibited by this drug.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Given the recent success of EGFR-targeted therapeutics for the treatment of other solid tumors, and the well-established safety profile of trastuzumab, results presented here provide a rationale for re-evaluation of trastuzumab as an experimental ovarian cancer therapeutic, either in concert with, or perhaps as a "primer" for EGFR-targeted therapeutics.</p

Sub-arcsec X-Ray Telescope for Imaging The Solar Corona In the 0.25 - 1.2 keV Band

We have developed an X-ray telescope that uses a new technique for focusing X-rays with grazing incidence optics. The telescope was built with spherical optics for all of its components, utilizing the high quality surfaces obtainable when polishing spherical (as opposed to aspherical) optics. We tested the prototype X-ray telescope in the 300 meter vacuum pipe at White Sands Missile Range, NM. The telescope features 2 degee graze angles with tungsten coatings, yielding a bandpass of 0.25-1.5 keV with a peak effective area of 0.8 sq cm at 0.83 keV. Results from X-ray testing at energies of 0.25 keV and 0.93 keV (C-K and Cu-L) verify 0.5 arcsecond performance at 0.93 keV. Results from modeling the X-ray telescope's response to the Sun show that the current design would be capable of recording 10 half arcsecond images of a solar active region during a 300 second NASA sounding rocket flight