Preventive maintenance is a broad term that encompasses a set of activities aimed at improving the overall reliability and availability of a system. Preventive maintenance involves a basic trade-off between the costs of conducting...
The Faroe Islands are a small archipelago in the North Atlantic. With a current population of approximately 49,000 individuals and evidence of high levels of genetic drift, the Faroese are thought to have remained highly homogeneous since their...
Williams syndrome--Genetic aspects; Anxiety disorders
Genetic factors play an important role in the etiology of anxiety disorders. Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic disorder caused by a deletion on chromosome 7q11.23 and associated with increased prevalence of anxiety disorders relative to the general...
Prostate cancer (PCA) development may be influenced by genetic variations within oxidative stress response (OSR) related mechanisms, such as antioxidation (e.g.,
carcinogen metabolism/detoxification), DNA repair, and apoptotic regulation. Excessive...
Heuristic; Production management; Personnel management--Data processing
The Naval Surface Warfare Center wishes to create a task assignment schedule
with a minimal training cost for workers to raise their skills to the required levels. As the
number of workers, skills, and tasks increase, the problem quickly becomes...
This thesis begins by reviewing human N-acetyltransferases (Chapter I), then outlines experiments involving human hepatocytes and rat N-acetyltransferases (Chapters II-V). These experiments facilitated the development of a dissertation project...
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic autoimmune disorder that is subdivided into Crohn's disease (CD), ulcerative colitis (UC), and indeterminate colitis (IC). Epidemiological studies have proven that genetic variation increases...
Background: Helicobacter pylori (Hp) establishes life-long gastric infection in billions of humans, and is often responsible for diseases such as peptic ulcer and gastric cancer. Cumulative actions of genetic drift and natural selection over...
Polymorphisms in the adrenergic receptor beta-2 (ADRB2) gene have been studied in relation to risk of Type 2 diabetes and obesity, but few studies have investigated associations with breast cancer. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the...
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is an idiopathic pervasive neurodevelopmental disorder associated with various neuropathologies and immunological dysfunctions. Cytokines are regulatory proteins that facilitate communication between the immune and...
Hypertension--Genetic aspects; Coronary heart disease--Genetic aspects; African Americans--Health and hygiene
Cardiovascular diseases, including hypertension, are the leading causes of death in
the United States. African-Americans carry the highest burden of disease with 32% of
adults with hypertension. Blood pressure (BP) dipping, defined as a drop of>...
Embryonic development requires the orchestration of temporally precise genetic events that culminate in the formation of a complete organism. The molecular mechanisms responsible for ontogenesis are regulated by environmental and somatic factors in...
We study a sensor location problem that minimizes the total number of sensors to install at road intersections in a transportation network so that the traffic flows on the entire network are uniquely determined. We employ the concepts of hidden...
Few previous studies have compared microbial communities in subterranean and surface environments. Chemical analyses used to characterize the surface and cave microbial environments indicated limited exchange between surface and subsurface waters....
In recent years, a number of computational and statistical problems for identifying SNP-SNP interactions in high dimensional survival data have been studied, and several data mining approaches have been proposed. However, the relative performance...
Unrepaired DNA damage poses a serious threat to the genetic stability of a replicating cell. One mechanism of tolerating this damage is translesion DNA synthesis (TLS), in which an accessory polymerase synthesizes DNA directly across from a damaged...
Mucin 1 (MUC1) is a plasma membrane-bound glycoprotein that plays a protective role in corneal epithelial cells. Two full-length splice variants of MUCl: MUCl/B and MUCl/A, that differ by the inclusion of 27 bp from intron 1 and a SNP in MUCl/A,...
High-throughput sequencing has provided a myriad of genetic data for thousands of organisms. Computational analysis of one data type, expressed sequence tags (ESTs) yields insight into gene expression, alternative splicing, tissue specificity gene...
Business logistics; Production management; Manufacturing processes; Industrial efficiency
In today's competitive business environment, companies face enormous pressure and must continuously search for ways to design new products, manufacture and distribute them in an efficient and effective fashion. After years of focusing on reduction...
The ability of L. pneumophila to cause disease depends on its replication in alveolar macrophages. Infectivity and the expression of various virulence traits is triggered at post exponential growth phase. We show that unlike quiescent macrophages,...
