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The Investigation of Shrinkage in Apoptotic Bodies
No full textThe Investigation of Shrinkage in Apoptotic Bodies By Ashley Ilinkoski and Michael Model Objectives Apoptosis is programmed cell death where the cell shrinks then eventually fragments and dies, also considered the point of no return. This method can possibly be controlled by putting cells in different media to ensure ions pouring into the cell rather than out. Shrinkage is one of the most universal and specific signs of apoptotic cell death. (Some data suggest that shrinkage due to water loss is the requirement for apoptosis). However, in some apoptotic systems shrinkage occurs late, after irreversible cell damage has occurred. Such systems provide a good model to investigate the exact role of shrinkage in apoptotic development. One specific hypothesis we wish to address is that shrinkage is necessary for cell fragmentation into “apoptotic bodies”. Methods Apoptosis is induced in HeLa cells with camptothecin or RNA polymerase actinomycin D. After the onset of irreversible changes (i.e., morphological blebbing, mitochondrial depolarization or cytochrome c release) treatments designed to inhibit cell water loss are applied. Aqua porin inhibitors are also being introduced to the cells to see if the porins close to sustain cell life by cutting off water transport. The results include formation of apoptotic bodies and DNA fragmentation. The loss of cell material is monitored by the TIE-TTD microscopy and DNA fragmentation by the TUNEL assay. Results Preliminary data indicates that high-potassium medium that opposes water loss prevents formation of apoptotic bodies. Conversely, high-sodium medium that activates water loss results in active cell fragmentation. Future work will clarify these results.</p
Trieste and the Context of Italian Culture
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/ugresearch/2015/English_Comm/4/thumbnail.jpgItalian culture is widely popular and despite great complexity between regions, it is often stereotyped, particularly by Americans. My own travels to several major Italian cities shifted my perspective on Italy as a unified, homogenous nation to one that might be defined by fragmented micro-cultures with stronger regional ties than national ones. In order to account for this phenomenon, I have undertaken my own cultural study of Italy through Trieste, a city on the northeastern border. Initially exposed to Trieste through my research on the Triestine author Italo Svevo and his novel La Coscienza di Zeno, I visited the city in November to gain an insider perspective on the culture. With the help of a local Triestine, I discovered that the city hardly fits into the neat classification of an Italian city due to its conflicted history and highly heterogeneous cultural makeup as well as linguistic distinctions. Taking my own personal experiences in Trieste and fleshing them out with research in both English and Italian, I am now examining Trieste within the larger context of Italy using historical, linguistic and cultural anthropological investigative techniques to shift how we view Italy and rethink the criteria for how we classify cultures, Italian or otherwise, as Trieste cannot be tied to one place or culture with certainty. My research will potentially be augmented by a return trip to Trieste in May of 2015 to gain further insights on Trieste that will serve as the context for my research on Italo Svevo’s works.</p
Journal of SPORT Volume 4 Issue 2 2015
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Indigenous Peoples Student Project: Documenting Story Telling though Photographs and Video / Poems
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/dei/2015/presentations/4/thumbnail.jpgIndigenous Peoples Student Project: Documenting Story Telling though Photographs and Video--Storytelling is a powerful method of communication; I do it with a camera. Telling stories stems from traditional cultures, many of which are represented at the Council of the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers. Photographs have the power to convey emotion and moment, and video has the power to transport the audience to another time and place. I choose how to frame the subject, when to push the button, which elements to arrange together, and how to connect them to tell a story. I also teach this process to students majoring in journalism. At the gathering I was able to photograph the site, the surrounding Black Hills, and interview people who are drawn to the grandmothers and their message. My Intro to Video Production class at the Stark Campus was assigned a project. Students had to tell stories from the photos/audio and video I collected at the conference with little direction from me about my experience. It was an incredible opportunity for them to learn about new cultures, to learn how to find the story, and to interview me to help build narratives. I will be sharing these video pieces and photo prints and bringing the gathering of the 13 Grandmothers experience to Kent State University. Poems of Kimberlee Medicine Horn Jackson - Sometimes the soft voice, even the silent voice of words on the page can have a lasting impact on the heart and change it forever. For decades, the voices of the Native American Adoptee have been largely unknown and therefore; unheard. Today, more of us Lost Birds and Split feathers find our way back to our Native homelands through DNA testing or other mysterious means that are more than just coincidence. Adoption is another means of Indian removal; my poetry collection “Walking Fire” addresses this topic.</p
Anne Reid
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/dei_bio_gallery/10/thumbnail.jpgAnne Reid’s career in higher education included positions as writing and literature instructor, international student advisor, women’s center administrator, academic advisor and career counselor, and academic administrator. Her interest in social justice, women’s and gay rights have expressed themselves in a number of projects and activities. She was thrilled to be part of the 2014 trip to Seneca Falls.</p
Denise Harrison
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/dei_bio_gallery/9/thumbnail.jpgDenise A. Harrison has an English Literature degree from Miami of Ohio. She has taught at Kent State University for the past eight years. In addition, Denise holds a cognate in Women’s Studies and actively teaches about the intersections of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and sexual minorities in her college writing courses. She has a background in African American women writers. Her rising interest and scholarship is informed by questions of reproduction equity in the lives of women of color. Ms. Harrison teaches an Honors Colloquium—Shakespeare: Revisited, Early Modern Mirroring the Post-Modern World. As a social activist instructor, Ms. Harrison includes experiential learning in all her courses. In the past two years, she has been instrumental in developing a project that allows students to travel to Seneca Falls, New York to walk in the footsteps of American’s first feminist, Africans seeking freedom and the Indigenous populations calling for basic human and sovereign rights. The project will become a course in Spring 2016.</p
Validation of Secure Network Traffic and Convergence of BB84 to Quantum Mechanics
No full textThis paper presents research on various encryption schemes and their applications in securing data. Specifically, I discuss their vulnerabilities, implementations (both logically and mathematically), and briefly mention their durability against cryptanalysis attacks. I also present their mathematical properties, and theories that are assumed to hold within a security parameter. In particularly, I focus my attention on the RSA (Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman) Encryption Algorithm and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) Algorithm in CBC mode (Cipher Block Chaining) against chosen-plaintext attacks [1] due to their popularity. I also introduce BB84 (Benett and Brassard 1984) and its relation to the one-time pad encryption scheme. Finally, by analyzing the pros and cons of all of the algorithms, I explain why the use of the one-time pad and BB84 key exchange are inherently superior to other approaches.</p
Nonlinear Schrodinger Equation on a Space Scale
No full textIt is well-known that solitary waves on shallow water can be modeled by nonlinear KdV and nonlinear Schrodinger (NLS) equations. These equations may be deduced from the operator Lax equation Ablowitz-Kaup-Newel-Segur proposed to use the matrix version of Lax equation to produce solvable nonlinear equation. This presentation gives the extension of the Lax equation on a time-space scale. Using this extension, we deduce NLS on a space scale.</p
Overview of Ebola History and Spread
No full textSurvey of evolutionary rate estimates in Ebola virus Ebola virus first appeared in 1976 in Sudan and Zaire as an illness characterized by fever, severe diarrhea, vomiting and a high fatality rate. Since then there were multiple Ebola outbreaks, some deadlier than others. The ongoing epidemic begun in 2013 in Guinea, and then spread to neighboring countries, leading to over 4900 estimated deaths in the region by late 2014, and continuing to ravage the region. The disease is highly contagious when there is a skin-to-skin contact, with the burial practices exasperating the problem of transmission. Recent spread of epidemic outside of remote villages underscores the critical need to develop vaccination and/or treatment options to be broadly available in potentially affected areas. However, up to date vaccine development has been challenging , in part because previous outbreaks were relatively small, thus, little was understood about the evolution of the Ebola virus. Currently, more genomes of Ebola are sequenced and available, thus, enabling phylogenetic and molecular evolutionary studies. In order to know whether vaccine or antibody treatments will maintain efficacy, the nature of genetic change in the virus (especially in the targeted regions) must be ascertained. Thus, in this project we survey published estimates of evolutionary rates of various Ebola genes and/or strains to determine (a) the most conserved genes as the most promising vaccine candidates, and (b) whether the rate of evolutionary changes in the virus has increased in recent epidemics compared to previous ones.</p
Amylin administration decreases levels of oxidative stress markers in APP/PS1 transgenic mice.
No full textAlzheimer’s disease (AD) is one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases today. Oxidative stress has been proposed as a key pathological feature in AD. Previous studies in our laboratory show that administration of peptide hormone amylin in mouse models of AD improves cognitive function and reduces oxidative stress damage to membranes. However, how amylin provides neuroprotection against oxidative stress damage is not known. To address this question we treated APP/PS1 mice, a mouse model of AD, with amylin for two months and also treated primary hippocampal neurons from these mice with various doses of amylin. From these treatments, we determined the levels of various oxidative enzymes and stress signaling proteins known to be altered in the AD brain and important in the regulation of oxidative stress damage. Our data shows that, in vitro, amylin is able to dose-dependently protect primary hippocampal neurons from oxidative insults (H2O2). Further, in vivo, a two month treatment with amylin is able to reduce AD-associated upregulation of the Heme-oxygenase-1 (HO-1), an enzyme known to be activated in response to high levels of oxidative stress. Importantly, these reductions in HO-1 paralleled upregulations of MnSOD expression, a classic endogenous antioxidant enzyme, and reductions in levels of phosphorylated JNK, known to be increased during cellular stress. Taken together our data demonstrates that amylin may be improving CNS function through its ability to reduce oxidative stress damage, both by upregulating endogenous protective systems and preventing the activation of cellular cascades.</p