Loss of inhibitory control from descending serotonergic (5-HT) fibers deregulates the excitability of spinal motoneurons and interneurons following spinal cord injury (SCI). Exaggerated synaptic activity triggers long-lasting excitatory postsynaptic potentials (long EPSPs) in hyperexcitable motoneurons to ultimately drive muscle spasms at the chronic stage of SCI. Deep dorsal horn (DDH)...
The polypeptide hormone prolactin (PRL) is increasingly recognized as contributing to the development and progression of human breast cancer. This is supported by epidemiologic studies that found women with high levels of serum PRL are at an increased risk for developing breast cancer. Activation of the prolactin receptor (PRLR) by...
Natural products provide a renewable resource of novel chemical structures with relevance to the pharmaceutical, agricultural and materials industries. Genome sequencing has revealed that these industries currently rely on only a fraction of the number of natural products that exist in nature. Based on the impact that known natural products...
The genetic code, a set of rules by which mRNA codons are translated into the twenty standard amino acids used in protein synthesis, was once thought to be immutable. As we expanded our understanding of molecular biology more variations in this genetic code have been found across the animal kingdom....
As the title suggests, this dissertation is composed of three major topics. The first two are optimization problems focusing on developing effective solution methodologies, while for the last topic we present a large-scale information retrieval system in the domain of sports. With the algorithms and frameworks developed in this dissertation,...
The development of metal-based probes has provided major benefits to understanding basic biological process and clinical outcomes. Metals offer access to geometries that carbon alone cannot attain, along with valuable magnetic, optical, and binding properties. Metals have proven to be particularly useful in advancing molecular imaging, a field that seeks...
Scholars have noted that food marketing significantly impacts the lives of children, influencing what foods they request and consume. However, the impact of food marketing on low-income children has only been explored minimally. This project explores both media-based and in-store food marketing to low-income families, along with potential outcomes of...
Advancements in nanotechnology have led to the production of devices with components with sub-100 nm size scales. Studies have investigated how properties of polymers change when confined to nanoscale dimensions. However, stiffness-confinement studies have reported increases, decreases, and invariance with confinement for different polymer/substrate pairs, making it difficult to obtain...
We studied the nonlocal effects of intraspecific prey competition on the stability of the critical points of the Rosenzweig-MacArthur model and the Holling-Tanner model, respectively, using linear stability analysis. In particular we focused on the study of the stability of the coexistence state influenced by the nonlocality for both models....
Algebras and their bimodules form a 2-category in which 2-morphisms are certain zero-th Hochschild cohomology groups. When we derive this structure (i.e., use Hochschild cochains instead of HH^0 for 2-morphisms), we find that algebras form a category in dg cocategories. The Hochschild-Kostant-Rosenberg theorem and non-commutative calculus give a rich algebraic...