Effective gene therapy must deliver therapeutic genes to disease sites while avoiding healthy tissue. However, engineering targeted gene delivery vectors to ensure exclusive delivery to diseased sites remains a challenge. Adeno-associated virus (AAV) is receiving increasing attention for its potential as a gene delivery vehicle because it offers ...

Ethanol is playing a key role in current discussions on energy, agriculture, taxes and the environment. This work addresses the potential environmental impacts and behavior of subsurface fuel-ethanol releases. A continuous-flow 8,150-L pilot-aquifer tank packed with sand was used to simulate two spill scenarios: (1) fuel-grade ethanol (E95, 95% v/v ...

The current nanotechnology boom necessitates timely research into the health and environmental impacts of nanomaterials to enhance their eco-responsible manufacture, use, and disposal. Using the water-insoluble C60 as a model nanomaterial, the potential environmental impacts of a C60 water suspension, termed nC60, are here assessed with bacteria as ...

Introgression due to hybridization is important for our understanding of species divergence. In this study, we analyze potential introgression between Macaca mulatta and M fascicularis using DNA sequences from 19 genes. While the putative introgression between these species has been studied previously, it has not been analyzed using nuclear loci from ...

Many finite-dimensional minimization problems and nonlinear equations can be solved using Secant Methods. In this thesis, we present a historical development of the (n + 1)-point Secant Method tracing its evolution back before Newton's Method. Many believe the Secant Method arose out of the finite difference approximation of the derivative in Newton's ...

Motion planning is a fundamental algorithmic problem that attracts attention because of its importance in many exciting applications, such as controlling robots or virtual agents in simulations and computer games. While there has been great progress over the last decades in solving high-dimensional geometric problems there are still many challenges ...

Arsenic has become a major contaminant of concern due to the increased knowledge of its toxicological and carcinogenic effects on human health, causing the maximum contaminant level (MCL) to be lowered from 50mug/L to 10mug/L in the United States. Lowering the MCL requires improving current methods or developing new ones to remove arsenic from the ...

A high-resolution 3D P-wave velocity model of the mantle beneath eastern Asia was obtained through performing seismic travel-time tomography by using recently emerging new datasets. An improved relocation method that accounts for correlated travel-time errors among similar ray paths was applied to reduce location bias caused by unmodeled heterogeneities. ...

This thesis details the development of a targeted nanoshell therapy for cancer specific photothermal ablation. By attaching targeting antibodies or ligands to the nanoshell surface, these targeted nanoshells preferentially bind to tumor sites. When NIR light is applied over the tumor region containing nanoshells, the nanoshells heat, thus destroying ...

We present the methods used to add continuum element functionality to the structure side of our Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) solver. The FSI solver, already capable of handling the interaction between membrane structure elements and fluid elements, can now accurately simulate fully 3D structure models as well. A few simple test calculations are ...