DNA serves many functional roles in living organisms, and dynamic DNA nanotechnology seeks to expand this set of DNA-based behaviors through the rational design of new functions. In the past 20 years, the predictable and ...

This thesis focuses on a mutualism between the East African acacia tree Vachellia drepanolobium and the species of canopy-dwelling ants that inhabit it. The tree provides the ants with nesting space in the canopy and ...

Changes in epigenetic states are at the heart of normal developmental processes and also underlie many human diseases. Studies to date have established strong associations between histone post-translational modifications, ...

Individuals from the same species often differ quantitatively in many phenotypes. Understanding the genetic causes of such individuality may improve our understanding of the corresponding phenotypes, and our ability to ...

Early embryogenesis is a profoundly important time during which morphological rearrangements pattern the growing embryo. Research throughout animals has demonstrated that both the morphological changes and the underlying ...

All living organisms are shaped by natural selection. Therefore, by studying natural selection as a generic process, we may gain insights into broad questions regarding the diversity of life, the fit of organisms to their ...

Breast cancer is predicted to be the most frequent newly diagnosed cancer and second leading cause of cancer-associated death among women in the United States in 2018. Intratumoral heterogeneity plays an important role in ...

The efficacy of therapeutics such as antibiotics and cancer immunotherapy is double-edged: as they eradicate agents of disease, they simultaneously select for resistant populations, eventually causing their own obsolescence. ...

This thesis addresses a crucial aspect of the design of infectious disease genome-wide association studies (GWAS's): the selection of a control group. In particular, we examined how the level of pathogen exposure within ...

Biological processes are often far too complex to predict. For those phenomenon that still evade understanding, it is helpful to visualize a black box—a system with clear inputs and outputs, but an unknowable, labyrinthine ...