http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/78399 2013-05-24T10:19:38Z http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/83241 Lean Six Sigma to reduce blood wastage Mandell, Steven 2010-09-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/78342 An analysis of antiseptic and antibiotic properties of variously treated mosses and lichen. Morton, Elaine; Winters, Josh; Smith, Lauren Lichen, a symbiosis between algae and fungus, and sphagnum moss are both able to fight against bacteria. In this experiment, we tested whether moss and lichen have antibiotic or antiseptic properties on human-affecting bacteria, and to find out which types of mosses and lichen have the strongest of these properties. We collected samples of fruticose lichen, foliose lichen, crustose lichen, red sphagnum moss (Sp. 1) and green sphagnum moss (Sp. 2) from Bryant Bog and placed them into 160 Petri dishes with bacteria. We also recorded the pH of each type, to see if it had a relationship with bacterial growth. Although pH was not found to be related to antiseptic and antibiotic properties, treatments of each taxon were found to make a difference in the inhibition of bacterial growth. The abilities lichen and sphagnum moss to fight off bacteria were determined after they were plated for five days with gram-positive bacteria in an incubator at 35C. From our test, we were able to draw the conclusion that fruticose, when crushed, was a strong antibiotic compound, and ground green sphagnum moss (Sp. 2) was a strong antiseptic compound. General Ecology 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/78314 Phenothiazine-mediated rescue of cognition in tau transgenic mice requires neuroprotection and reduced soluble tau burden O'Leary, John C III; Li, Qingyou; Marinec, Paul; Blair, Laura J; Congdon, Erin E; Johnson, Amelia G; Jinwal, Umesh K; Koren, John III; Jones, Jeffrey R; Kraft, Clara; Peters, Melinda; Abisambra, Jose F; Duff, Karen E; Weeber, Edwin J; Gestwicki, Jason E; Dickey, Chad A Abstract Background It has traditionally been thought that the pathological accumulation of tau in Alzheimer's disease and other tauopathies facilitates neurodegeneration, which in turn leads to cognitive impairment. However, recent evidence suggests that tau tangles are not the entity responsible for memory loss, rather it is an intermediate tau species that disrupts neuronal function. Thus, efforts to discover therapeutics for tauopathies emphasize soluble tau reductions as well as neuroprotection. Results Here, we found that neuroprotection alone caused by methylene blue (MB), the parent compound of the anti-tau phenothiaziazine drug, Rember™, was insufficient to rescue cognition in a mouse model of the human tauopathy, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) and fronto-temporal dementia with parkinsonism linked to chromosome 17 (FTDP17): Only when levels of soluble tau protein were concomitantly reduced by a very high concentration of MB, was cognitive improvement observed. Thus, neurodegeneration can be decoupled from tau accumulation, but phenotypic improvement is only possible when soluble tau levels are also reduced. Conclusions Neuroprotection alone is not sufficient to rescue tau-induced memory loss in a transgenic mouse model. Development of neuroprotective agents is an area of intense investigation in the tauopathy drug discovery field. This may ultimately be an unsuccessful approach if soluble toxic tau intermediates are not also reduced. Thus, MB and related compounds, despite their pleiotropic nature, may be the proverbial "magic bullet" because they not only are neuroprotective, but are also able to facilitate soluble tau clearance. Moreover, this shows that neuroprotection is possible without reducing tau levels. This indicates that there is a definitive molecular link between tau and cell death cascades that can be disrupted. 2010-11-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/78257 Examination of the relationship between essential genes in PPI network and hub proteins in reverse nearest neighbor topology Ning, Kang; Ng, Hoong Kee; Srihari, Sriganesh; Leong, Hon Wai; Nesvizhskii, Alexey I Abstract Background In many protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks, densely connected hub proteins are more likely to be essential proteins. This is referred to as the "centrality-lethality rule", which indicates that the topological placement of a protein in PPI network is connected with its biological essentiality. Though such connections are observed in many PPI networks, the underlying topological properties for these connections are not yet clearly understood. Some suggested putative connections are the involvement of essential proteins in the maintenance of overall network connections, or that they play a role in essential protein clusters. In this work, we have attempted to examine the placement of essential proteins and the network topology from a different perspective by determining the correlation of protein essentiality and reverse nearest neighbor topology (RNN). Results The RNN topology is a weighted directed graph derived from PPI network, and it is a natural representation of the topological dependences between proteins within the PPI network. Similar to the original PPI network, we have observed that essential proteins tend to be hub proteins in RNN topology. Additionally, essential genes are enriched in clusters containing many hub proteins in RNN topology (RNN protein clusters). Based on these two properties of essential genes in RNN topology, we have proposed a new measure; the RNN cluster centrality. Results from a variety of PPI networks demonstrate that RNN cluster centrality outperforms other centrality measures with regard to the proportion of selected proteins that are essential proteins. We also investigated the biological importance of RNN clusters. Conclusions This study reveals that RNN cluster centrality provides the best correlation of protein essentiality and placement of proteins in PPI network. Additionally, merged RNN clusters were found to be topologically important in that essential proteins are significantly enriched in RNN clusters, and biologically important because they play an important role in many Gene Ontology (GO) processes. 2010-10-12T00:00:00Z