101 results match your criteria: "Halmos College of Arts and Sciences[Affiliation]"

Article Synopsis
  • Hammerhead sharks belong to the Sphyrnidae family, which is noted for their unique head shape and consists of a diverse Miocene radiation of sharks.
  • The bonnethead shark (Sphyrna tiburo) is divided into two recognized subspecies based on geographic distribution, with genetic evidence suggesting a more complex species structure.
  • Research comparing vertebral counts and morphological characteristics has confirmed the presence of two distinct species in the Western Atlantic: S. tiburo and a newly identified species, S. alleni, distinguished by specific vertebral counts and a unique shovel-shaped head.
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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates ancient microbiomes in archaeological dental calculus from 102 individuals across 10 Pacific islands and one island in Southeast Asia over ~3000 years, revealing insights into human migration patterns.
  • DNA from oral microbiomes in dental calculus is better preserved than human DNA from bones, allowing for a clearer analysis of historical microbial communities.
  • The oral microbial communities from the Pacific and Island Southeast Asia are distinct from those in Europe, Africa, and Asia, indicating that geographic factors influence the composition of these ancient microbiomes.
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Metabolomic profiles of stony coral species from the Dry Tortugas National Park display inter- and intraspecies variation.

mSystems

December 2024

School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Engineered Biosystems Building, Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Unlabelled: Coral reefs are experiencing unprecedented loss in coral cover due to increased incidence of disease and bleaching events. Thus, understanding mechanisms of disease susceptibility and resilience, which vary by species, is important. In this regard, untargeted metabolomics serves as an important hypothesis-building tool enabling the delineation of molecular factors underlying disease susceptibility or resilience.

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Acclimation and size influence predation, growth, and survival of sexually produced Diploria labyrinthiformis used in restoration.

Sci Rep

November 2024

Department of Marine Biology and Ecology, Rosentiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA.

Stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) has swept through Florida reefs and caused mass mortality of numerous coral species. In the wake of these losses, efforts are underway to propagate coral species impacted by SCTLD and promote population recovery. However, numerous knowledge gaps must be addressed to effectively grow, outplant, and restore populations of the slower growing, massive species that were lost.

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Article Synopsis
  • Niosomes, a type of vesicular nanocarrier, are being researched for their potential in controlled drug delivery, offering advantages over liposomes like improved stability and ease of production.
  • This study developed a specific niosomal formulation for the drug temozolomide (TMZ), using a method that tested different lipid compositions to optimize drug loading and release.
  • The results showed that the optimized niosomes achieved a 73.23% drug entrapment efficiency and sustained release for 24 hours, while liposomes released their drug much faster, highlighting the superior stability of niosomes.
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Supragingival Plaque Microbiomes in a Diverse South Florida Population.

Microorganisms

September 2024

Department of Biological Sciences, Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, Guy Harvey Oceanographic Center, Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33328, USA.

Article Synopsis
  • Trillions of microbes in the human mouth act as a crucial organ, but there's a lack of understanding about oral microbiomes in underrepresented ethnic groups in the U.S. like Hispanics, Blacks, and Asians.
  • The study uses advanced sequencing to examine bacterial communities in saliva and plaque from 26 healthy individuals in South Florida, a culturally diverse area.
  • Findings reveal notable differences in microbial composition based on factors like mouth location, sex, and gingival health, underscoring the importance of including a diverse range of populations in oral microbiome research.
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Role of vesicular monoamine transporter-2 for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a review.

Psychopharmacology (Berl)

November 2024

Dr. Kiran C. Patel College of Allopathic Medicine, Health Profession Division, Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA.

Article Synopsis
  • ADHD is a condition that makes it hard for people to focus and control their actions, and it's linked to how the brain develops.
  • A special transporter in the brain called VMAT-2 is important for how certain ADHD medicines, like stimulants, work, but other treatments still need more research.
  • Studies show that some things like omega-3 fatty acids and other supplements might help with ADHD, but scientists need to study these ideas further with people to understand more.
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Fluoride Alters Gene Expression via Histone H3K27 Acetylation in Ameloblast-like LS8 Cells.

Int J Mol Sci

September 2024

Department of Oral Science and Translational Research, College of Dental Medicine, Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33314, USA.

Article Synopsis
  • - Fluoride ingestion during tooth development can lead to dental fluorosis, and it activates histone acetyltransferase (HAT), which modifies the protein p53 and contributes to fluoride toxicity in specific mouse cells (LS8).
  • - The study showed that fluoride modifies histone acetylation, altering gene expression in LS8 cells, as evidenced by increased acetylation levels of certain genes and corresponding mRNA expression when treated with fluoride.
  • - This research is the first to highlight that fluoride treatment can lead to epigenetic changes through H3 acetylation, indicating a need for further investigation into how fluoride affects enamel development on a genetic level.
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Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a highly aggressive and incurable disease accounting for about 10,000 deaths in the USA each year. Despite the current treatment approach which includes surgery with chemotherapy and radiation therapy, there remains a high prevalence of recurrence. Notable improvements have been observed in persons receiving concurrent antihypertensive drugs such as renin angiotensin inhibitors (RAS) or the antidiabetic drug metformin with standard therapy.

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Research demonstrates that college educated, English language dominant bilinguals underperform relative to English speaking monolinguals on tests of verbal ability. We investigated whether accepting responses in their two languages would reveal improved performance in bilinguals, and whether such improvement would be of sufficient magnitude to demonstrate the same performance level as monolinguals. Participants were college students attending the same university.

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Regional reef fish assemblage maps provide baseline biogeography for tropicalization monitoring.

Sci Rep

April 2024

GIS and Spatial Ecology Lab, Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, Nova Southeastern University, 8000 North Ocean Drive, Dania Beach, FL, 33004, USA.

The Anthropocene rise in global temperatures is facilitating the expansion of tropical species into historically non-native subtropical locales, including coral reef fish. This redistribution of species, known as tropicalization, has serious consequences for economic development, livelihoods, food security, human health, and culture. Measuring the tropicalization of subtropical reef fish assemblages is difficult due to expansive species ranges, temporal distribution shifts with the movement of isotherms, and many dynamic density-dependent factors affecting occurrence and density.

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Signals of selection and ancestry in independently feral Gallus gallus populations.

Mol Ecol

October 2024

AVIAN Behavioural Genomics and Physiology Group, IFM Biology, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.

Recent work indicates that feralisation is not a simple reversal of domestication, and therefore raises questions about the predictability of evolution across replicated feral populations. In the present study we compare genes and traits of two independently established feral populations of chickens (Gallus gallus) that inhabit archipelagos within the Pacific and Atlantic regions to test for evolutionary parallelism and/or divergence. We find that feral populations from each region are genetically closer to one another than other domestic breeds, despite their geographical isolation and divergent colonisation histories.

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Legacy of a magic gene-: From discovery to clinical benefit in a generation.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

March 2024

Guy Harvey Oceanographic Center, Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, Nova Southeastern University, Ft Lauderdale, FL 33004.

The discovery of the 32-bp deletion allele of the chemokine receptor gene showed that homozygous carriers display near-complete resistance to HIV infection, irrespective of exposure. Algorithms of molecular evolutionary theory suggested that the mutation occurred but once in the last millennium and rose by strong selective pressure relatively recently to a ~10% allele frequency in Europeans. Several lines of evidence support the hypothesis that was selected due to its protective influence to resist the agent of the Black Death/bubonic plague of the 14th century.

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Evaluation of Metal Partitioning across Humboldt Penguin (Spheniscus humboldti) Egg Components.

J Wildl Dis

April 2024

Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences, Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, Nova Southeastern University, 8000 N. Ocean Dr., Dania Beach, Florida 33004, USA.

Humboldt Penguin (Spheniscus humboldti) population declines are attributable to several multifaceted anthropogenic impacts. At present, the exposure of Humboldt Penguins to high concentrations of heavy metals in the marine environment is a preeminent concern, due to mining along the Peruvian coast near key rookery sites. Metal and selenium concentrations were determined in eggs collected from September 2020 to April 2021 from a managed-care penguin population at the Brookfield Zoo to establish reference values for health indices conducted on wild populations.

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Temperature and local anthropogenic pressures limit stony coral assemblage viability in southeast Florida.

Mar Pollut Bull

March 2024

National Coral Reef Institute, Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, Nova Southeastern University, 8000 N Ocean Drive, Dania Beach, FL 33004, USA.

Climate change is viewed as the primary threat to coral reefs, with local pressures exacerbating coral cover decline. The consensus is that improving water quality may increase resilience, but disentangling water quality and temperature impacts is difficult. We used distance-based linear models and random forests to analyze spatiotemporal variation in benthic community structure and interannual changes in the coral assemblage, in relation to specific environmental metrics in Southeast Florida.

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Poor oral health is associated with cardiovascular disease and dementia. Potential pathways include sepsis from oral bacteria, systemic inflammation, and nutritional deficiencies. However, in post-industrialized populations, links between oral health and chronic disease may be confounded because the lower socioeconomic exposome (poor diet, pollution, and low physical activity) often entails insufficient dental care.

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HIV infection continues to be a major global public health issue. The population heterogeneity in susceptibility or resistance to HIV-1 and progression upon infection is attributable to, among other factors, host genetic variation. Therefore, identifying population-specific variation and genetic modifiers of HIV infectivity can catapult the invention of effective strategies against HIV-1 in African populations.

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Seasonally mediated niche partitioning in a vertically compressed pelagic predator guild.

Proc Biol Sci

December 2023

Guy Harvey Research Institute, Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, Nova Southeastern University, Dania Beach, FL, 33004, USA.

Niche partitioning among closely related, sympatric species is a fundamental concept in ecology, and its mechanisms are of broad interest for understanding ecosystem functioning and predicting the impacts of human-driven environmental change. However, identifying mechanisms by which top marine predators partition available resources has been especially challenging given the difficulty of quantifying resource use of large pelagic animals. In the eastern tropical Pacific (ETP), three large, highly mobile and ecologically similar pelagic predators (blue marlin (), black marlin () and sailfish ()) coexist in a vertically compressed habitat.

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Whether and how the spatial arrangement of a population influences adaptive evolution has puzzled evolutionary biologists. Theoretical models make conflicting predictions about the probability that a beneficial mutation will become fixed in a population for certain topologies like stars, in which "leaf" populations are connected through a central "hub." To date, these predictions have not been evaluated under realistic experimental conditions.

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Despite the successes of immunotherapy, melanoma remains one of the deadliest cancers, therefore, the need for innovation remains high. We previously reported anti-melanoma compounds that work by downregulating spliceosomal proteins hnRNPH1 and H2. In a separate study, we reported that these compounds were non-toxic to Balb/C mice at 50 mg/kg suggesting their utility in in vivo studies.

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Many marine species can regulate the intensity of bioluminescence from their ventral photophores in order to counterilluminate, a camouflage technique whereby animals closely match the intensity of the downwelling illumination blocked by their bodies, thereby hiding their silhouettes. Recent studies on autogenic cuticular photophores in deep-sea shrimps indicate that the photophores themselves are light sensitive. Here, our results suggest photosensitivity in a second type of autogenic photophore, the internal organs of Pesta, found in deep-sea sergestid shrimps.

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Ancient DNA reveals genetic admixture in China during tiger evolution.

Nat Ecol Evol

November 2023

The State Key Laboratory of Protein and Plant Gene Research, School of Life Sciences; Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China.

The tiger (Panthera tigris) is a charismatic megafauna species that originated and diversified in Asia and probably experienced population contraction and expansion during the Pleistocene, resulting in low genetic diversity of modern tigers. However, little is known about patterns of genomic diversity in ancient populations. Here we generated whole-genome sequences from ancient or historical (100-10,000 yr old) specimens collected across mainland Asia, including a 10,600-yr-old Russian Far East specimen (RUSA21, 8× coverage) plus six ancient mitogenomes, 14 South China tigers (0.

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Measures and models of visual acuity in epipelagic and mesopelagic teleosts and elasmobranchs.

J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol

September 2023

Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA.

Eyes in low-light environments typically must balance sensitivity and spatial resolution. Vertebrate eyes with large "pixels" (e.g.

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Dental calculus as a proxy for animal microbiomes.

Quat Int

April 2023

DANTE - Diet and ANcient TEchnology Laboratory, Department of Oral and Maxillo-Facial Sciences, "Sapienza" University of Rome, 00161, Rome, Italy.

The field of dental calculus research has exploded in recent years, predominantly due to the multitude of studies related to human genomes and oral pathogens. Despite having a subset of these studies devoted to non-human primates, little progress has been made in the distribution of oral pathogens across domestic and wild animal populations. This overlooked avenue of research is particularly important at present when many animal populations with the potentiality for zoonotic transmission continue to reside in close proximity to human groups due to reasons such as deforestation and climatic impacts on resource availability.

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Sea turtle hatching success can be affected by many variables, including pathogenic microbes, but it is unclear which microbes are most impactful and how they are transmitted into the eggs. This study characterized and compared the bacterial communities from the (i) cloaca of nesting sea turtles (ii) sand within and surrounding the nests; and (iii) hatched and unhatched eggshells from loggerhead (Caretta caretta) and green (Chelonia mydas) turtles. High throughput sequencing of bacterial 16S ribosomal RNA gene V4 region amplicons was performed on samples collected from 27 total nests in Fort Lauderdale and Hillsboro beaches in southeast Florida, United States.

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