Effects of Discovery, Iteration, and Collaboration in Laboratory Courses on Undergraduates' Research Career Intentions Fully Mediated by Student Ownership.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) provide a promising avenue to attract a larger and more diverse group of students into research careers. CUREs are thought to be distinctive in offering students opportunities to make discoveries, collaborate, engage in iterative work, and develop a sense of ownership of their lab course work. Yet how these elements affect students' intentions to pursue research-related careers remain unexplored.

Benefit-Cost Analysis of Undergraduate Education Programs: An Example Analysis of the Freshman Research Initiative.

Institutions and administrators regularly have to make difficult choices about how best to invest resources to serve students. Yet economic evaluation, or the systematic analysis of the relationship between costs and outcomes of a program or policy, is relatively uncommon in higher education. This type of evaluation can be an important tool for decision makers considering questions of resource allocation.

Early Engagement in Course-Based Research Increases Graduation Rates and Completion of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Degrees.

National efforts to transform undergraduate biology education call for research experiences to be an integral component of learning for all students. Course-based undergraduate research experiences, or CUREs, have been championed for engaging students in research at a scale that is not possible through apprenticeships in faculty research laboratories. Yet there are few if any studies that examine the long-term effects of participating in CUREs on desired student outcomes, such as graduating from college and completing a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) major.

Identification of DSB-1, a protein required for initiation of meiotic recombination in Caenorhabditis elegans, illuminates a crossover assurance checkpoint.

Meiotic recombination, an essential aspect of sexual reproduction, is initiated by programmed DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). DSBs are catalyzed by the widely-conserved Spo11 enzyme; however, the activity of Spo11 is regulated by additional factors that are poorly conserved through evolution. To expand our understanding of meiotic regulation, we have characterized a novel gene, dsb-1, that is specifically required for meiotic DSB formation in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.

A Systematic Investigation of -Nitrophenol Reduction by Bimetallic Dendrimer Encapsulated Nanoparticles.

We demonstrate that the reduction of -nitrophenol to -aminophenol by NaBH is catalyzed by both monometallic and bimetallic nanoparticles (NPs). We also demonstrate a straightforward and precise method for the synthesis of bimetallic nanoparticles using poly(amido)amine dendrimers. The resulting dendrimer encapsulated nanoparticles (DENs) are monodisperse, and the size distribution does not vary with different elemental combinations.

Spectrophotometric titration of bimetallic metal cation binding in polyamido(amine) dendrimer templates.

Spectrophotometric titration and a binding isotherm were used to accurately assess the loading capacity of generation four polyamido(amine) (PAMAM) dendrimer templates with terminal alcohol groups (G4-OH). Preparation of bimetallic G4-OH dendrimer-encapsulated metal nanoclusters (DENs) necessitates knowledge of the precise metal-ion binding capacity. The binding of metal ions such as Pt(2+) and Pd(2+) has proven difficult to assess via UV-vis spectroscopy because the absorbance shifts associated with metal-ion binding within the dendrimer template are masked by the absorbance of the PAMAM dendrimer itself.

A role for cortactin in Listeria monocytogenes invasion of NIH 3T3 cells, but not in its intracellular motility.

Cortactin is an F-actin binding protein that binds to the Arp2/3 complex, stimulates its actin nucleation activity, and inhibits actin filament debranching. Using RNA interference directed against cortactin, we explored the importance of cortactin for several processes involving dynamic actin assembly. Silencing cortactin expression was efficiently achieved in HeLa and NIH 3T3 cells, with less than 5% of cortactin expression in siRNA-treated cells.

Critical conformational changes in the Arp2/3 complex are induced by nucleotide and nucleation promoting factor.

Actin nucleation and branching by the Arp2/3 complex is tightly regulated by activating factors. However, the mechanism of Arp2/3 complex activation remains unclear. We used fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) to probe the conformational dynamics of the Arp2/3 complex accompanying its activation.