Poster presented at the 2010 Document Academy Annual Meeting. This poster discusses digital collection development policies and documenting content and processes.

Poster advertising a concert by Drink to Victory, Dust Congress, Drug Mountain, and Daniel Francis Doyle on Saturday, August 28, 2010, at RGRS (Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios), Denton, Texas. Poster features a hand-drawn illustration of a unicorn, squirrel, and stars in light and dark purple ink, with event information in hand-drawn purple text written in the stars above the unicorn. Other text in chartreuse ink is scrawled, graffiti-like, across the image, reading "Do Not Attend This Blasphemy", "Repent! John 3:16", "wtf?!->", and "ACDC RULZ". The show was presented by Gutterth Productions and was advertised as a record release for both Drink to Victory and Dust Congress, and as the last show for Drug Mountain.

Increasing nitrogen deposition, increasing atmospheric CO2, and decreasing biodiversity are three main environmental changes occurring on a global scale. The BioCON (Biodiversity, CO2, and Nitrogen) ecological experiment site at the University of Minnesota's Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve started in 1997, to better understand how these changes would affect soil systems. To understand how increasing nitrogen deposition affects the microbial community diversity, heterogeneity, and functional structure impact soil microbial communities, 12 samples were collected from the BioCON plots in which nitrogenous fertilizer was added to simulate the effect of increasing nitrogen deposition and 12 samples from without added fertilizer. DNA from the 24 samples was extracted using a freeze-grind protocol, amplified, labeled with a fluorescent dye, and then hybridized to GeoChip, a functional gene array containing probes for genes involved in N, S and C cycling, metal resistance and organic contaminant degradation. Detrended correspondence analysis (DCA) of all genes detected was performed to analyze microbial community patterns. The first two axes accounted for 23.5percent of the total variation. The samples fell into two major groups: fertilized and non-fertilized, suggesting that nitrogenous fertilizer had a significant impact on soil microbial community structure and diversity. The functional gene numbers detected in fertilized …

While more and more studies are being conducted on the effects of global warming, little is known regarding the response of metabolic change of whole soil microbial communities to this phenomenon. In this study, functional gene changes at the mRNA level were analyzed by our new developed GeoChip 3.0. Soil samples were taken from a long-term climate warming experiment site, which has been conducted for ~;;8 years at the Kessler Farm Field Laboratory, a 137.6-ha farm located in the Central Redbed Plains, in McClain County, Oklahoma. The experiment uses a paired factorial design with warming as the primary factor nested with clipping as a secondary factor. An infrared heater was used to simulate global warming, and clipping was used to mimic mowing hay. Twelve 2m x 2m plots were divided into six pairs of warmed and control plots. The heater generates a constant output of ~;;100 Watts m-2 to approximately 2 oC increase in soil temperature above the ambient plots, which is at the low range of the projected climate warming by IPCC. Soil whole microbial communities? mRNA was extracted, amplified, labeled and hybridized with our GeoChip 3.0, a functional gene array covering genes involved in N, C, P, and …

Poster from the Turtle Creek Chorale Collection advertising an emergency benefit concert which assisted people in Haiti following a massive earthquake in 2010. Proceeds from the concert would go towards the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund.

Poster presented at the 2010 Taxonomic Database Working Group Meeting. This poster discusses the Apiary Project, a collaboration of the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge at the University of North Texas and the Botanical Research Institute of Texas.

Poster presentation for the 2010 University Scholars Day at the University of North Texas discussing research on forensic toxicology.

This poster examines the role of forgiveness and stigma in health distress in both adherent and non-adherent HIV+ Individuals.

Poster depicting a three-compartment sink labelled with the purpose of each area. There is also information about sanitizing solutions and minimum required temperatures to meet Texas Health Department regulations.

Poster advertising Fun Fun Fun Fest 2010, a music festival held November 5-7, 2010, at Waterloo Park, Austin, Texas. The poster features a design of text and text blocks shooting forward from the center of the page in black ink on brown kraft paper, advertising the following festival acts: Suicidal Tendencies, Descendents, The Bronx, Best Coast, Weird Al Yankovic, Jean Grae, MGMT, Slick Rick, Delorean, Wavves, Bad Religion, Deerhunter, Devin the Dude, RJD2, Monotonix, Yelle, Man Man, Washed Out, Mastodon, Dirty Projectors, Gwar, The Hold Steady, Cap'n Jazz, Snapcase, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Dam Funk, The Vandals, P.O.S., HIgh on Fire, A-Trak, The Gories, Os Mutantes, Strike Anywhere, Mariachi El Bronx, Dwarves, Pharoahe Monch, and Municipal Waste.

Biodiversity and its responses to environmental changes is a central issue in ecology, and for society. Almost all microbial biodiversity researches focus on species richness and abundance but ignore the interactions among different microbial species/populations. However, determining the interactions and their relationships to environmental changes in microbial communities is a grand challenge, primarily due to the lack of information on the network structure among different microbial species/populations. Here, a novel random matrix theory (RMT)-based conceptual framework for identifying functional ecological gene networks (fEGNs) is developed with the high throughput functional gene array hybridization data from the grassland microbial communities in a long-term FACE (Free Air CO2 Enrichment) experiment. Both fEGNs under elevated CO2 (eCO2) and ambient CO2 (aCO2) possessed general characteristics of many complex systems such as scale-free, small-world, modular and hierarchical. However, the topological structure of the fEGNs is distinctly different between eCO2 and aCO2, suggesting that eCO2 dramatically altered the interactions among different microbial functional groups/populations. In addition, the changes in network structure were significantly correlated with soil carbon and nitrogen dynamics, and plant productivity, indicating the potential importance of network interactions in ecosystem functioning. Elucidating network interactions in microbial communities and their responses to environmental changes are …

Poster presentation for the 2010 University Scholars Day at the University of North Texas discussing research on gangs and preventive measures.

Poster presentation for the 2010 University Scholars Day at the University of North Texas discussing research on Gnosticism, early Christianity, and the Valentinian School's interaction with Christians in the second century C.E.

This poster examines the relationships between anxiety, spirituality, and depression in persons living with HIV.

Microbiomes play very important roles in terms of nutrition, health and disease by interacting with their hosts. Based on sequence data currently available in public domains, we have developed a functional gene array to monitor both organismal and functional gene profiles of normal microbiota in human and mouse hosts, and such an array is called human and mouse microbiota array, HMM-Chip. First, seed sequences were identified from KEGG databases, and used to construct a seed database (seedDB) containing 136 gene families in 19 metabolic pathways closely related to human and mouse microbiomes. Second, a mother database (motherDB) was constructed with 81 genomes of bacterial strains with 54 from gut and 27 from oral environments, and 16 metagenomes, and used for selection of genes and probe design. Gene prediction was performed by Glimmer3 for bacterial genomes, and by the Metagene program for metagenomes. In total, 228,240 and 801,599 genes were identified for bacterial genomes and metagenomes, respectively. Then the motherDB was searched against the seedDB using the HMMer program, and gene sequences in the motherDB that were highly homologous with seed sequences in the seedDB were used for probe design by the CommOligo software. Different degrees of specific probes, including gene-specific, …

Desulfovibrio vulgaris is an anaerobic sulfate-reducing bacterium capable of facilitating the removal of toxic metals such as uranium from contaminated sites via reduction. As such, it is essential to understand the intricate regulatory cascades involved in how D. vulgaris and its relatives respond to stressors in such sites. One approach is the identification and analysis of small non-coding RNAs (sRNAs); molecules ranging in size from 20-200 nucleotides that predominantly affect gene regulation by binding to complementary mRNA in an anti-sense fashion and therefore provide an immediate regulatory response. To identify sRNAs in D. vulgaris, a bacterium that does not possess an annotated hfq gene, RNA was pooled from stationary and exponential phases, nitrate exposure, and biofilm conditions. The subsequent RNA was size fractionated, modified, and converted to cDNA for high throughput transcriptomic deep sequencing. A computational approach to identify sRNAs via the alignment of seven separate Desulfovibrio genomes was also performed. From the deep sequencing analysis, 2,296 reads between 20 and 250 nt were identified with expression above genome background. Analysis of those reads limited the number of candidates to ~;;87 intergenic, while ~;;140 appeared to be antisense to annotated open reading frames (ORFs). Further BLAST analysis of the intergenic …

Poster presentation for the 2011 University Scholars Day at the University of North Texas discussing research on the ignorance towards male rape and the psychological toll on victims.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a dangerous Actinobacteria infecting nearly one third of the human population. It becomes dormant and phenotypically drug resistant in response to stresses. An important feature of the M. tuberculosis pathogenesis is the prevalence of latent infection without disease, making understanding of the mechanisms used by the bacteria to exist in this state and to switch to metabolically active infectious form a vital problem to consider. M. tuberculosis dormancy is regulated by the three-component regulatory system of two kinases (DosT and DevS) and transcriprional regulator (DevR). DevR activates transcription of a set of genes, which allow the bacteria to survive long periods of anaerobiosis, and may be important for long-term survival within the host during latent infection. The DevR-regulon is studied experimentally in M. tuberculosis and few other phylogenetically close Mycobacteria spp. As many other two-component systems, the devRS operon is autoregulated. However, the mechanism of the dormancy is not completely clear even for these bacteria and there is no data describing the dormancy regulons in other species.

Poster presented at the 2010 Texas Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) Conference. This poster discusses the integration of ETDs into topical digital library collections and facilitating ETD use and reuse.

Poster presentation for the 2010 University Scholars Day at the University of North Texas discussing research on international policies on pollution.

Poster presentation for the 2010 University Scholars Day at the University of North Texas discussing research on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).

Multiple sets of chemotaxis genes including three cheA homologs were identified in the genome sequence of the anaerobic bacterium Desulfovibrio vulgaris Hildenborough. Each CheA is a histidine kinase (HK) and part of a two component signal transduction system. Knock out mutants in the three cheA genes were created using single cross-over homologous recombination insertion. We studied the phenotypes of the cheA mutants in detail and discovered that ?cheA-3 has a non swarming/swimming phenotype both in the soft agar plates and Palleroni chamber assays. CheA-3 shows similarity to the Shewanella oneidensis CheA-3 and the Vibrio cholerae CheA-2 that are responsible for chemotaxis in the respective organisms. We did not find any morphological or structural differences between the three Delta cheA mutants and the wild type cells in electron microscopy. Our results from these studies are presented.

Due to increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations causing the global energy and environmental crises, geological sequestration of carbon dioxide is now being actively considered as an attractive option to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. One of the important strategies is to use deep unminable coal seams, for those generally contain significant quantities of coal bed methane that can be recovered by CO2 injection through enhanced coal bed natural gas production, as a method to safely store CO2. It has been well known that the adsorbing CO2 molecules introduce structural deformation, such as distortion, shrinkage, or swelling, of the adsorbent of coal organic matrix. The accurate investigations of CO2 sorption capacity as well as of adsorption behavior need to be performed under the conditions that coals deform. The U.S. Department of Energy-National Energy Technology Laboratory and Regional University Alliance are conducting carbon dioxide sorption isotherm experiments by using manometric analysis method for estimation of CO2 sorption capacity of various coal samples and are constructing a gravimetric apparatus which has a visual window cell. The gravimetric apparatus improves the accuracy of carbon dioxide sorption capacity and provides feasibility for the observation of structural deformation of coal sample while carbon dioxide molecules interact with coal …

Poster presentation for the 2010 University Scholars Day at the University of North Texas discussing research on the isolation of a new strain of mycobacteriophage from soil collection using a Mycobacterium smegmatis host strain and an enrichment protocol.