Mycobacterium avium causes disseminated infection in humans with immunodeficiency, pulmonary infections in individuals with predisposing lung conditions (e.g., pneumoconiosis), and cervical lymphadenitis in children. Twenty-five to fifty percent of late stage AIDS patients are infected with M. avium. M. avium has been recovered from drinking water and strains from water share identical DNA fingerprints with isolates recovered from patients exposed to the water. Further, M. avium is resistant to chlorine, a disinfectant commonly used in municipal water supplies. Because of the slow growth of M. avium, measuring its susceptibility to disinfectants is laborious and reaction to a potential problem is delayed. Thus, there exists a need for a rapid test to measure the antimycobacterial disinfectant capability of chlorine containing water samples. The objective of this research was to develop a rapid and quantitative assay for the viability of mycobacteria using firefly luciferase as a reporter gene for disinfection survival studies. Derivatives of M. avium strains MD1 and A5, Mycobacterium smegmatis strain VT307 and Mycobacterium bovis BCG strain Pasteur carrying the firefly luciferase gene (pLUC10) were constructed. In pLUC10-carrying strains of M. avium strain A5 and M. smegmatis strain VT307, a direct correlation was shown between the quantity of light produced and the number of cells recovered as colony forming units. In disinfection studies of both pLUC10-carrying derivatives of M. avium strain A5 and M. smegmatis strain VT307, survival, as measured in colony forming units, correlated with survival in relative light units. Luciferase measurements appear to offer a method for rapid enumeration of mycobactericidal disinfection capacity of chlorinated water. / Master of Science

No description available.

PXR mediated elevation of CYP3A4 expression is a costly problem in drug development as well as a clinical problem due to clinically important drug interactions caused by the enzyme induction. CYP3A4 is responsible for the metabolism of more than 50% of the drugs commonly used today. Many of these, as well as other compounds e.g. in herbal medicines can induce transcription of CYP3A4 and thereby enhance the metabolism of other drugs, rendering them ineffective or more toxic. By using an in vitro assay for CYP3A4 induction, tests can be performed on candidate drugs early in development and thereby save time and resources since CYP3A4 inducers are eliminated from further development. A reporter gene assay was constructed by inserting three modules, which includes PXR binding sites isolated from the CYP3A4 sequence, in front of a luciferase gene. This construct was transfected together with PXR into HEK 293 cells. Induction was evoked by adding rifampicin, a known CYP3A4 inducer, to the medium. After lysis of the HEK cells and addition of luciferase substrate, luminescence intensity was recorded as a measure of induction. The construct worked and consistently showed induction by rifampicin, but could be further improved to yield higher sensitivity.

<p>PXR mediated elevation of CYP3A4 expression is a costly problem in drug development as well as a clinical problem due to clinically important drug interactions caused by the enzyme induction. CYP3A4 is responsible for the metabolism of more than 50% of the drugs commonly used today. Many of these, as well as other compounds e.g. in herbal medicines can induce transcription of CYP3A4 and thereby enhance the metabolism of other drugs, rendering them ineffective or more toxic. By using an in vitro assay for CYP3A4 induction, tests can be performed on candidate drugs early in development and thereby save time and resources since CYP3A4 inducers are eliminated from further development. A reporter gene assay was constructed by inserting three modules, which includes PXR binding sites isolated from the CYP3A4 sequence, in front of a luciferase gene. This construct was transfected together with PXR into HEK 293 cells. Induction was evoked by adding rifampicin, a known CYP3A4 inducer, to the medium. After lysis of the HEK cells and addition of luciferase substrate, luminescence intensity was recorded as a measure of induction. The construct worked and consistently showed induction by rifampicin, but could be further improved to yield higher sensitivity.</p>

No description available.

No description available.

Master of Science / Department of Diagnostic Medicine/Pathobiology / Ying Fang / Seneca Valley Virus (SVV) causes vesicular disease in pigs. Vesicular lesions on the snout and coronary band of hoof mostly resemble lesions caused by Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus (FMDV), which may lead to the foreign animal disease investigation. In 2015, Brazil experienced major outbreaks of SVV; then in July, sporadic cases of SVV were reported in United States and became a concern in swine industry. A reverse-genetic system serves as a major tool to study pathogenesis of the virus. In our study, a full-length cDNA infectious clone, pKS15-01-Clone, was constructed from an emerging Seneca Valley Virus (SVV; strain KS15-01). To explore the potential use as a viral backbone for expressing marker genes, the enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP)-tagged reporter virus (vKS15-01-EGFP) was generated using reverse genetics. Compared to the parental virus, the pKS15-01-Clone derived virus (vKS15-01-Clone) replicated efficiently in vitro and in vivo, and induced similar levels of neutralizing antibody and cytokine responses in infected animals. In contrast, the vKS15-01-EGFP virus showed impaired growth ability and induced lower level of immune response in infected animals. Lesions on the dorsal snout and coronary bands were observed in all pigs infected by parental virus KS15-01, but not in pigs infected with vKS15-01-Clone or vKS15-01-EGFP viruses. These results demonstrated that the infectious clone and EGFP reporter virus will be important tools in further elucidating the SVV pathogenesis and development of control measures.

Hurricane Wilma: A Love Story is a coming-of-age memoir about the two years the narrator spent rebuilding his hurricane-damaged condo in Miami Beach in order to provide a home for the woman he would eventually marry. The torturous rebuilding process forced the narrator to confront his deepest insecurities, to overcome a lifelong mother dependency and to assume adult responsibility. He learns to accept and even love the imperfections and particularities of his apartment, just as he does those of his girlfriend. The writing style aspires to the elegance of Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, the integrity of William Finnegan’s Crossing the Line, the irreverence of Carl Hiaasen’s Basket Case and the insight of Calvin Trillin’s Remembering Denny. The memoir is a tale of growing up despite oneself, of a young journalist who comes to learn, through a series of missteps and misadventures, the true meaning of home.

To study the regulation of gene expression, a good reporter system is very useful. The lack of a good reporter system for the solvent-producing clostridia hindered the progress of research in this area. The objective of this study was to develop a reporter system to facilitate the elucidation of the control mechanism for the expression of solvent-producing genes. A potential reporter gene was found in Clostridium beijerinckii NRRL B593, which contains an adh gene encoding a primary-secondary alcohol dehydrogenase and this adh gene is not present in Clostridium acetobutylicum ATCC 824 and Clostridium beijerinckii NRRL B592. The adh gene was cloned into the E. coli -Clostridium shuttle vectors to generate plasmids. An electro-transformation procedure was developed for C. beijerinckii NRRL B592. Shuttle plasmids were transformed into C. beijerinckii NRRL B592 or C. acetobutylicum ATCC 824. The copy number of the plasmids in C. beijerinckii was 4. Isopropanol production suggested that the adh gene was expressed in transformants of C. acetobutylicum ATCC 824 and C. beijerinckii NRRL B592. Northern analysis indicated that the expression of the adh gene was regulated at the transcriptional level in the transformants of C. beijerinckii. The transcriptional start site for the adh gene was identified by the primer extension method. A promoter-probing vector was constructed and tested with the promoter from the ferredoxin(fer) gene. The expression of the adh gene under the control of the fer promoter was at a low and similar level during acidogenesis and solventogenesis. The expression pattern of the adh gene under the control of the promoter of the adh gene differed from that under the control of the promoter of the fer gene. / Ph. D.

The field of synthetic biology has leveraged engineering tools such as molecular cloning to create new biological components, networks, and processes. While many of these components and networks have been deployed in the cytosol, there is a shortage of systems that utilize the surface of the cell. In order to address this shortcoming, we have created a synthetic, surface-displayed substrate anchor for bacteria. This approach allows us to engineer surface-based synthetic biological systems as a complement to existing intracellular approaches. We leveraged the tools of synthetic biology to display a catalytically active enzyme that covalently bonds itself to benzylguanine (BG) groups. We created a fusion protein allowing us to place human O6-alkylguanine DNA alkyltransferase (hAGT), also known as SNAP, on the surface of a bacterial cell. Initially, we used this synthetic component as a tool for spatially segregating orthogonal synthetic gene outputs by visualizing an extracellular synthetic green fluorescent reporter, SNAP-Cell® 505-Star, simultaneously with an intracellular red fluorescent protein, mCherry. Moreover, we have shown that our construct enables cells to selectively bond to BG-conjugated magnetic beads. As a result, we have demonstrated that surface displayed SNAP facilitates engineering a direct channel between intracellular gene expression and extracellular material capture. In the near future, we believe this magnetic capture can be expanded as a sortable reporter for synthetic biology as a direct extension of this work. Moreover, our work serves as an enabling technology, paving the way for extracellular synthetic biological systems that may coexist orthogonally to intracellular processes. / Master of Science