Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Electrogenerated Chemiluminescence Study Of Semiconductor Nanoparticles Towards Sensitive Detection Of Biomolecules, Yiliyasi Wusimanjiang

Dissertations

The main focus of this dissertation is to unfold the fundamental aspects of electrogenerated chemiluminescence (ECL) generation from semiconductor nanoparticles (also known as quantum dots or QDs) within different ECL systems. The ECL and photo-physical interactions between the CdTe QDs (λ_emission= ~760 nm) and the CdSe QDs (λ_emission= ~550 nm), as well as the effects of carbon nanotubes on ECL of QDs were separately investigated. Optimum experimental conditions for peptide bond formation on an electrode surface through EDC (1-ethyl-3-(-3-dimethylaminopropyl) carbodiimide hydrochloride)/NHS (N-Hydroxysulfosuccinimide) coupling were also revealed using cyclic voltammetry technique. Based on the information …

Investigating The Impact Of Unsupervised Feature-Extraction From Multi-Wavelength Image Data For Photometric Classification Of Stars, Galaxies And Qsos, Annika Lindh

Dissertations

This thesis reviews the current state of photometric classification in Astronomy and identifies two main gaps: a dependence on handcrafted rules, and a lack of interpretability in the more successful classifiers. To address this, Deep Learning and Computer Vision were used to create a more interpretable model, using unsupervised training to reduce human bias.

The main contribution is the investigation into the impact of using unsupervised feature-extraction from multi-wavelength image data for the classification task. The feature-extraction is achieved by implementing an unsupervised Deep Belief Network to extract lower-dimensionality features from the multi-wavelength image data captured by the Sloan Digital …

In Vivo And In Vitro Studies Of Polyamides That Are Active Antiviral Agents Against Hpv16, Edith Csiki-Fejer

Dissertations

Long-term, persistent infection with high-risk strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) is the precursor of most cervical cancers and an increasing number of the head and neck cancers. While HPV vaccines can protect patients under twenty-five years old from possible infections, no HPV antiviral drugs are available for the definitive treatment of preexisting or future viral infections. To treat current or future HPV infections, drugs that selectively block virus-specific processes, but do not damage the host cells, are needed. The compounds developed in our group are unique Imidazole-pyrrole polyamides, analogs of natural products Distamycin A and Netropsin that function by interfering …

Hamiltonian Bifurcations In Schrodinger Trimers, Casayndra H. Basarab

Dissertations

The phase space of the three-mode discrete NLS in the nonlinear regime with periodic boundary conditions is investigated by reducing the degree of freedom from three down to two. The families of standing waves are enumerated and normal forms are used to describe several families of relative periodic orbits whose topologies change due to Hamiltonian Hopf bifurcations and transcritical bifurcations. The Hamiltonian Hopf bifurcation occurs when eigenvalues on the imaginary axis collide and split and has two types: elliptic and hyperbolic. These two types arise in the DNLS problem, and the families of periodic orbits are discussed as a conserved …

Structural Exploration And Inference Of The Network, Ruihua Cheng

Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two parts. In the first part, a learning-based method for classification of online reviews that achieves better classification accuracy is extended. Automatic sentiment classification is becoming a popular and effective way to help online users or companies to process and make sense of customer reviews. The method combines two recent developments. First, valence shifters and individual opinion words are combined as bigrams to use in an ordinal margin classifier. Second, relational information between unigrams expressed in the form of a graph is used to constrain the parameters of the classifier. By combining these two components, it …

Efficient High-Order Integral Equation Methods For The Heat Equation, Shaobo Wang

Dissertations

Efficient high-order integral equation methods have been developed for solving the boundary value problems of the heat equation with complex geometries in two and three dimensions. First of all, the classical heat potential theory is applied to convert such problems to Volterra integral equations of the second kind via the heat layer potentials. Some advantages of the integral formulation as compared with standard finite difference and finite element methods include reduction of the dimension of the problem by one, high order accuracy, unconditional stability, insensitivity to different geometries, and elimination of truncating the computational domain and the need of artificial …

Algorithms For Pre-Microrna Classification And A Gpu Program For Whole Genome Comparison, Ling Zhong

Dissertations

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are non-coding RNAs with approximately 22 nucleotides that are derived from precursor molecules. These precursor molecules or pre-miRNAs often fold into stem-loop hairpin structures. However, a large number of sequences with pre-miRNA-like hairpin can be found in genomes. It is a challenge to distinguish the real pre-miRNAs from other hairpin sequences with similar stem-loops (referred to as pseudo pre-miRNAs). The first part of this dissertation presents a new method, called MirID, for identifying and classifying microRNA precursors. MirID is comprised of three steps. Initially, a combinatorial feature mining algorithm is developed to identify suitable feature sets. Then, the …

Numerical Simulations Of Dense Granular Systems With And Without Cohesive Effects, Lenka Kovalcinova

Dissertations

Granular materials are collections of objects ranging from sand grains that form sand piles or even sand castles to collections of large objects such as a group of meteors in outer space. The considered range of sizes of granular particles is such that the effect of thermal fluctuations is not relevant. However, the interaction between the particles may be very complex, involving inelasticity and friction, in addition to repulsive and possibly attractive interaction forces. These interactions that may be history dependent, make the systems that consist of a large number of particles complex to analyze and difficult to understand using …

An Integrated Transport Solution To Big Data Movement In High-Performance Networks, Daqing Yun

Dissertations

Extreme-scale e-Science applications in various domains such as earth science and high energy physics among multiple national institutions within the U.S. are generating colossal amounts of data, now frequently termed as “big data”. The big data must be stored, managed and moved to different geographical locations for distributed data processing and analysis. Such big data transfers require stable and high-speed network connections, which are not readily available in traditional shared IP networks such as the Internet. High-performance networking technologies and services featuring high bandwidth and advance reservation are being rapidly developed and deployed across the nation and around the globe …

Accelerating Data-Intensive Scientific Visualization And Computing Through Parallelization, Dongliang Chu

Dissertations

Many extreme-scale scientific applications generate colossal amounts of data that require an increasing number of processors for parallel processing. The research in this dissertation is focused on optimizing the performance of data-intensive parallel scientific visualization and computing.

In parallel scientific visualization, there exist three well-known parallel architectures, i.e., sort-first/middle/last. The research in this dissertation studies the composition stage of the sort-last architecture for scientific visualization and proposes a generalized method, namely, Grouping More and Pairing Less (GMPL), for order-independent image composition workflow scheduling in sort-last parallel rendering. The technical merits of GMPL are two-fold: i) it takes a prime factorization-based …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Amphiphiles For Mammalian Cell Transfection And Antimicrobial Activity, Joseph William Meisel

Dissertations

Amphiphiles are molecules that contain both water-soluble and water-insoluble components. The dual nature of these molecules engenders remarkable properties including the ability to self-assemble into ordered structures. Cell membranes are composed of amphiphilic phospholipids that organize into a bilayer motif. Synthetic amphiphiles can interact with natural membranes and influence the transport of molecules across the cell membrane. The work elaborated in this report employs amphiphiles to co-assemble with DNA and transport the genetic material across cell membranes. First, a simplified method for interacting DNA with amphiphiles was developed. Second, a series of known ion-transporting compounds were assayed for their interaction …

Study Of Vaporization Enthalpies And Vapor Pressures Of Potential Environmental Pollutants By Correlation-Gas Chromatography, Chase Patrick Gobble

Dissertations

The focus of this dissertation is on the measurement and analysis of thermodynamic data, including vaporization, fusion, and sublimation enthalpies and vapor pressures of dialkyl phthalates, as well as aliphatic and aromatic primary and tertiary amines by correlation gas chromatography (CGC). These compounds are important industrial and pharmaceutical substances whose prolonged use and sometimes misuse with regards to their disposal has created an environmental concern. Thermodynamic properties, such as vaporization enthalpy and vapor pressure provide crucial information to numerous industries and fields of study that include the chemical and petrochemical industry, chemical engineering and environmental science. Dialkyl phthalates are essential …

Templated Oligosaccharide Synthesis, Jia Guang Xiao

Dissertations

Glycosyl transfer within the active site of an enzyme involves the arrangement of the gly-cosyl donor and glycosyl acceptor in close proximity to each other. To mimic this pro-cess, intramolecular glycosylations are carried out where the donor and acceptor are linked together via a spacer. Correct orientation, rigidity and position of the spacer play a vital role in the selectivity and yield of reactions in this “molecular clamp method”. Though current methodologies show promising results in terms of yield and selectivity, the need to synthesize different complexes to ensure selectivities in all types of glycosidic linkages is a large deterrent …

Synthesis Of Cyclic Enolphosphonates And Enolphosphates As Inhibitors Of Serine Hydrolases, Benjamin Patrick Martin

Dissertations

Cyclophostin is a potent naturally occurring inhibitor of acetylcholinesterase with a novel bicyclic enolphosphate structure. The cyclipostins are a family of potent hormone-sensitive lipase inhibitors which share the same bicyclic enolphosphate core structure with cyclophostin which but differ primarily in that they are long-chain alkyl phosphate esters whereas cyclophostin is a methyl phosphate ester. Due to the novelty of the inhibitor structure, potency, and ability to select between two serine hydrolase enzymes with a simple change in the ester substituent, the ongoing structure activity relationship investigation of this family of inhibitors was continued. Methods of transesterification were investigated in order …

An R-Matrix, Quantum Defect Theory Approach To The Photoionization Of Molecular Nitrogen, Gaetan L. Vangyseghem

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Influence Of The Electric Supply Industry On Economic Growth In Less Developed Countries, Edward Richard Bee

Dissertations

This study measures the impact that electrical outages have on manufacturing production in 135 less developed countries using stochastic frontier analysis and data from World Bank’s Investment Climate surveys. Outages of electricity, for firms with and without backup power sources, are the most frequently cited constraint on manufacturing growth in these surveys.

Outages are shown to reduce output below the production frontier by almost five percent in Africa and by a lower percentage in South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Production response to outages is quadratic in form. Outages also increase labor cost, reduce exports …

Preparation And Characterization Of Singlet-Oxygen Generating Thiol-Ene Networks Containing Fullerene And Metallofullerene Derivatives, Emily Matthews Barker

Dissertations

This work explores the derivatization of C₆₀ and Sc₃N@C₈₀ with S-, P-, and C- centered radicals, and is the first exploration into the functionalization of Sc₃N@C₈₀ with sulfur and phosphorous. The number of addends bound to C₆₀, as a function of reaction time and molar ratios, as well as, structure-property relationships including thermal stability, solubility, and singlet oxygen generation were explored. Fullerene derivatives exhibiting enhanced solubility were incorporated into two different thiol-ene polymer matrices at varying thiol-ene monomer concentrations (1:1 or 1:0.75 molar equivalents) and at different C₆₀ loadings (0, …

A Library Of Coumarin-Enaminone Chemodosimeters For The Detection Of Analytes, Aaron Berrell Davis

Dissertations

Many anions and metal ions are of biological and environmental importance. This work describes our attempts to synthesize molecular probes to specifically target cyanide, zinc, cadmium and mercury as these species can often result in negative effects to the environment and the human body.

The work in this dissertation, describes the synthesis of a family of coumarin-enamine chemodosimeters, in a straightforward synthetic procedure, the reaction between 7-(diethylamino)-4-hydroxycoumarin and a primary amine. The work presented in this dissertation demonstrates that these molecules can play dual roles and therefore the work is split into two distinct parts: Part 1 describes one role …

Analysis Of The Intricacies Of Substrate Recognition Of High Mobility Group Proteins And Aminoacyl-Trna Synthetases Using Non-Cognate Substrates, Douglas Van Iverson Ii

Dissertations

The studies presented in section 1 (Chapters I-IV) focus on the design and development of nucleic acid four-way junctions (4WJs) to target a member of the high mobility group (HMG) proteins, the proinflammatory cytokine high mobility group box 1 protein (HMGB1). In the present study, hybrid PNA-DNA 4WJs based on a model DNA 4WJ were constructed to improve the thermal stability of 4WJs while maintaining strong binding affinity toward HMGB1. An electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA) was used to examine the binding affinity of an isolated DNA binding domain of HMGB1, the HMGB1 b-box (HMGB1b), toward a set of PNA-DNA …

Hybrid Chebyshev Polynomial Scheme For The Numerical Solution Of Partial Differential Equations, Balaram Khatri Ghimire

Dissertations

In the numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs), it is common to find situations where the best choice is to use more than one method to arrive at an accurate solution. In this dissertation, hybrid Chebyshev polynomial scheme (HCPS) is proposed which is applied in two-step approach and one-step approach. In the two-step approach, first, Chebyshev polynomials are used to approximate a particular solution of a PDE. Chebyshev nodes which are the roots of Chebyshev polynomials are used in the polynomial interpolation due to its spectral convergence. Then, the resulting homogeneous equation is solved by boundary type methods including …

The Synthesis Of Chemosensors For Toxic Analytes, Johnathan Hugh Broome

Dissertations

A number of chemosensors have been designed and synthesized to target cations (Zn²⁺ions), neutral molecules (cathinones), charged molecules (aminoindanes), and anions. The Zn²⁺ ion sensor featured bistriazole designed binding unit and ferrocene signaling units. Characterization of Zn²⁺ ion binding was carried out with electrochemical techniques (CV and DPV), ¹H-NMR, mass spectrometry, and molecular modelling. It exhibited a 1:1 binding stoichiometry with Zn²⁺ and had an affinity for ZnCl₂ (Log K_1:1 = 4.1 ± 0.02) over other Zn²⁺ salts.

The cathinone probe was designed to selectively bind mephedrone over common street drugs …

Some Nonparametric Ordered Restricted Inference Problems In The Context Of A Statistical Education Study, Bradford M. Dykes

Dissertations

Over the past 10 years, the Department of Statistics at Western Michigan University has developed a question generating system that can be used for creating multiple forms of exams, quizzes and homework for online and face-to-face use. This system can also be used to provide students with a form of instantaneous feedback. With the goal of analyzing how different levels of feedback in an online learning environment impacts students' performance on assignments, this study presents data collected on two semesters of students enrolled in three different meeting types (strictly online, typical face-to-face, and honors face-to-face) of an introductory Statistics course. …

Binding Properties Of Large Antiviral Polyamides (Pa1 And Pa25) And Natural Product Derivatives As Inhibitors Of Serine Hydrolases, Elena Vasilieva

Dissertations

Polyamides are a class of DNA minor groove binders that were developed from the natural product Distamycin A. PA25 (20-ring PA) showed better activity (3-fold) in the elimination of HPV16 episomes than PA1 (14-ring PA). Binding studies of PA1 and PA25 were performed in the long control region of HPV16 (7348-122 bp). PA1 showed similar binding affinity to perfect match and single mismatch binding sites. PA1 bound to double, triple, and quadruple mismatch sites with lower affinity. PA25 bound with similar binding affinity to perfect through triple mismatch binding sites. PA25 bound quadruple mismatch sites and nonspecifically. Therefore, it was …

Context-Aware Collaborative Storage And Programming For Mobile Users, Mohammad A. Khan

Dissertations

Since people generate and access most digital content from mobile devices, novel innovative mobile apps and services are possible. Most people are interested in sharing this content with communities defined by friendship, similar interests, or geography in exchange for valuable services from these innovative apps. At the same time, they want to own and control their content. Collaborative mobile computing is an ideal choice for this situation. However, due to the distributed nature of this computing environment and the limited resources on mobile devices, maintaining content availability and storage fairness as well as providing efficient programming frameworks are challenging.

This …

N-Terminal Domains Of Copper Atpases In Plasmodium Falciparum, Dictyostelium Dicsoideum, Human Atp7b And A Chimera Of Atox1 With Metal Binding Domain Four Of Atp7b, Javan Kilango Kisaka

Dissertations

Copper transporting ATPases (Cu-ATPases) are essential for mediating copper uptake, maintaining cellular copper levels and prevention of accumulation of toxic copper. The most studied copper ATPases are the Menkes and Wilson proteins in eukaryotes, CopA and CopB found in bacteria. The precise interaction of the metal binding domains with their copper donor, the association of each metal binding domain within the N-terminal portion of the protein, how they communicate with each other, and the eventual metal ion translocation across the membrane, is little known. The variation in number of the cytosolic metal binding domains may also offer clues on the …

Chromatic Connectivity Of Graphs, Elliot Laforge

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Resolving Classes And Resolvable Spaces In Rational Homotopy Theory, Timothy L. Clark

Dissertations

A class of topological spaces is called a resolving class if it is closed under weak equivalences and homotopy limits. Letting R(A) denote the smallest resolving class containing a space A, we say X is A-resolvable if X is in R(A), which induces a partial order on spaces. These concepts are dual to the well-studied notions of closed class and cellular space, where the induced partial order is known as the Dror Farjoun Cellular Lattice. Progress has been made toward illuminating the structure of the Cellular Lattice. For example: Chachólski, Parent, and Stanley have shown that it …

Statistical Methodology For Data With Multiple Limits Of Detection, Robert M. Flikkema

Dissertations

Limitations of instruments used to collect continuous data sometimes lead to obtaining observations lower than a limit of detection. These observations are known as nondetects. They could be zeroes, or positive numbers, but they are too small to be recorded by a measuring device. Nondetects frequently occur in environmental data. Trace amounts of chemicals can exist in soil or groundwater and are undetectable by a machine reading. These observations pose a problem to researchers since the true values are unknown.

Simulations in the literature have led to inconsistent conclusions regarding what estimation technique to use with nondetect data when estimating …

Termination, Correctness And Relative Correctness, Nafi Diallo

Dissertations

Over the last decade, research in verification and formal methods has been the subject of increased interest with the need of more secure and dependable software. At the heart of software dependability is the concept of software fault, defined in the literature as the adjudged or hypothesized cause of an error. This definition, which lacks precision, presents at least two challenges with regard to using formal methods: (1) Adjudging and hypothesizing are highly subjective human endeavors; (2) The concept of error is itself insufficiently defined, since it depends on a detailed characterization of correct system states at each stage of …

Magnetic Reconnection In Small And Large Scales On The Sun, Xin Chen

Dissertations

Almost all solar activities observed are related to the solar magnetic field, especially the topological restructuring of magnetic fields, the so-called magnetic reconnection in solar physics. They are occurring at different scales related to various phenomena, during minimum or maximum of the solar cycle, from the photosphere to the solar corona.

For small-scale activities, type II spicules which display high velocity upflows observed at the limb, have the most possible underlying driving mechanism of magnetic reconnection. A set of tools is developed for detecting small-scale solar magnetic cancellations and the disk counterpart of type II spicules (the so-called Rapid Blueshifted …