Friday 10:20-11:0 Room 013

Title: Impact of Mountaintop Removal Reclamation on Small Mammal Communities in Eastern Kentucky

John K. Sanders and Joseph C. Whittaker
Beta Xi, Pikeville College

Although mountaintop removal is a common, and controversial, practice in Eastern Kentucky, there have been few studies on the impact of such techniques, especially concerning small mammal communities. In the Midwest United States, small mammal community compositions have shown change due to strip-mining. It is possible that the process of disturbance and reclamation could create new habitat for rare grassland species. The purpose of this study was to document small mammal communities in reclaimed mountaintop removal and valley-fill sites and to compare with small mammal communities in natural, unmined areas as well. We used a total of four different trap types per station in an attempt to maximize trapping success for different species. Mark-recaptured methodology was used to estimate populations. Results were standardized per 100 trap-nights for comparison between sites. In comparing densities and community diversity, there were more individuals captured in natural areas but the reclaimed sites had a higher diversity. However, this result is slightly misleading because two of the three sampled mountaintop sites had only one species of Peromyscus present.

Industrial Waste Water Treatment: Separated Hexavalent Chromium Reduction and Hydroxide Precipitation vs. Combined Treatment

Greg Jarvis
Rho Chapter, University of Indianapolis

Electroplating, powdercoating, and electrocoating operations generate industrial waste water that is necessary to treat before sending to sanitary sewers, as required by federal law. Different techniques and coatings produce different waste streams that are commonly treated separately. Treating multiple waste streams in a single vessel was tested, involving hexavalent chromium reduction and metal hydroxide precipitation in particular. Formerly, these processes took place in separate, conical-bottom tanks and were combined post-treatment. Analyzing the clear supernatant produced after all precipitates (classified F-006 Sludge) were removed gave values well under maximum concentration values for zinc, copper, chromium, and nickel.

Thioredoxin (TRx) acts like a growth factor for human lens epithelial cells. What is the mechanism by which TRx stimulate the growth of HLE-B3 cells?

Jennifer Wyatt
Rho Chapter, University of Indianapolis

Thioredoxin (TRx) is a small protein found in all prokaryotes and eukaryotes that regulates cellular activity by reducing proteins. TRx is an antioxidant from the oxidoreductase family with a molecular weight of 12 kDa. The only enzyme capable of reducing oxidized TRx is thioredoxin reductase (TR) which has a mass of 55 kDa. Current research focuses on the functions of TRx. TRx is thought to have a role in transcription, growth control, and immune function [1, 2]. Removing the TRx gene from an organism is believed to cause fatality, due to the vital functions of the TRx gene during embryonic development [3]. TRx has been found in the cytosol of plants and in the mitochondira of animals. More specifically, the isoforms TRx-1 and TRx-2 have been located in human [4] and mouse eye lenses [5]. Methods have been developed to clone TRx genes by using plasmids. The recombinant proteins were then purified, and the new TRx genes were used for research purposes.

Is Gallus gallus an appropriate model for apoptosis studies? Evidence from studies of Poly ADP-ribose polymerase in Gallus gallus embryonic cells.

Vicky Braun
Rho Chapter, University of Indianapolis

Apoptosis is a natural, genetically programmed mechanism of cell death. During apoptosis, the cell cycle is arrested, nuclear DNA is fragmented, and cells are converted to membrane-bound fragments. There are three known signal transduction pathways responsible for inducing apoptosis. First, is the withdrawal of growth factors, which cause the release of pro-apoptotic proteins that accumulate on the mitochondrion, and lead to a cascade of signaling events that kill the cell. The second method of apoptosis is caused by a cell death ligand binding to a transmembrane protein receptor that activates procaspsases and caspases, which then initiate the process of apoptosis. Third, chemically or physically induced DNA damage induces apoptosis by activation of the transcription factor p53, which in turn causes release of cytochrome C from mitochondria followed by activation of caspases. Caspase 3 cleaves the protein Poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase-1 (PARP-1), a DNA-binding zing finger protein that is known to be responsible for DNA damage repair. By cleaving PARP-1 into 24 and 89 kD peptides, cells are unable to repair the accumulating fragments of DNA that are part of the apoptosis process. Currently, apoptosis pathways are mainly being studied in Caenorhabditis elegans, or in transformed mammalian tumor cell lines. Because of my interest in apoptosis in normal cells, I explored the use of embryonic Gallus gallus (chicken) cells as a model system to study apoptosis. Chicken embryo fibroblasts (CEF) are easily obtained and maintained in the laboratory as primary cell cultures. Furthermore, chicken embryos are a well-characterized system for developmental biology. Current available antibodies used as probes to study apoptosis in vertebrates are produced using mammalian proteins as antigens. ClustalW comparisons of PARP-1 amino acid sequences from many different organisms showed extensive conservation between all species examined. Therefore, it was hypothesized that goat anti- mouse PARP-1 would likely bind to chicken PARP-1, and allow us to determine if DNA damaging agents such as UV cause caspase-induced PARP-1 cleavage in CEF cells.