Imagine engaging 4,000 incoming students for library orientation over the course of 19 days, 200 + students per day for one hour. Imagine using problem-based learning scenarios to convey the libraries’ role with research in 8 minutes or less. Imagine double-sided, free standing 4’ by 8’ chalkboards as the innovative tool to inspire students. Discover how to develop and implement an active learning experience that is easy to facilitate.
Panel presentation at the 2014 UC's Diversity Conference:Join a panel of students and librarians who will showcase their collaborative events focused on exploring cultures through personal experiences and library resources. The most recent event, Across Nations: Diversity Speaks, was a big success thanks to student engagement at all stages of planning and presentation. International and study abroad students planned, publicized and moderated the event. Student contributions ranged from social media publicity to the icebreaker – a culture shock video - to preparing ethnic foods and wearing traditional clothing. Most importantly, the inclusive and open dialog at the event allowed students to share their perceptions of other countries, including misconceptions that were corrected by students from those countries. The event serves as a model for utilizing student expertise and enthusiasm for enhancing cross cultural understanding and global engagement.
Acquiring, organizing, making accessible, and preserving information and data, including faculty archives, university records, theses/dissertations, and other output created by the university, is the library’s reason-for-being.
Paper Submitted to ARN Envisioning the Future as Critical Partners in Data-Driven Science Workshop
A presentation and paper delivered at Open Repositories 2012, the 7th International Conference on Open Repositories, held in Edinburgh, Scotland, July 9-13, 2012.
A video series that walks the viewer through the process of conducting legal research using paper resources.
Video 1 -- Legal Research: Intro
Video 2 -- Legal Research: Define Problem
Video 3 -- Legal Research: Find a Starting Point
Video 4 -- Legal Research: Read Starting Point
Video 5 -- Legal Research: Additional Material
Video 6 -- Legal Research: Validation
Video 7 -- Legal Research: Summary
Fungi in the genus Pneumocystis are the cause of a potentially life threatening
pneumonia, Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP). The understanding of the lifecycle, metabolism, and drug development has been hindered due to a lack of a long term in vitro culture system. Unlike most other fungi, members of the genus Pneumocystis do not appear to synthesize the major fungal sterol, ergosterol. However, genome scans and in vitro assays suggest the presence of functional genes involved in a sterol pathway. One of the goals of this work was to characterize the P. carinii sterol enzyme, lanosterol synthase (Erg7p), an essential enzyme of the sterol pathway. The activity of P. carinii Erg7p was assessed by heterologous expression of P. carinii Erg7p in a Saccharomyces cerevisiae Erg7p null mutant. Growth rates and lanosterol production were similar between S. cerevisiae expressing the P. carinii enzyme and S. cerevisiae expressing its own Erg7p under the same conditions, indicating that not only does P. carinii produce a functional Erg7p, but also that the enzyme functionally complements the S. cerevisiae enzyme. Western blotting and fluorescent localization studies revealed that P. carinii Erg7p localizes to lipid particles in S. cerevisiae as does S. cerevisiae Erg7p. A novel finding of these studies, was that P. carinii contains lipid particles, and that P. carinii Erg7p localizes to lipid particles in P. carinii. These studies indicate that P. carinii Erg7p functions similar to the S. cerevisiae enzyme, and may perform a similar function in P. carinii.
Biochemical analyses of sterols within the membranes of P. carinii have shown that it utilizes cholesterol rather than ergosterol as its bulk sterol. However, P. carinii does not appear to synthesize cholesterol from a de novo pathway, but rather scavenges
exogenous sterols from its mammalian host. S. cerevisiae is induced to undergo sterol
scavenging under anaerobic conditions. Consequently, another goal of this work was to provide information on the effect of O2 on sterol biosynthesis and sterol scavenging by P. carinii. ATP measurements revealed that the viability of P. carinii is severely decreased when maintained under hypoxic conditions, and this decrease correlated with an increase in drug susceptibility. We show that uptake of exogenous cholesterol by P. carinii occurred under normal O2 tensions, indicating that sterol scavenging is not limited to anaerobic conditions. Microarray analysis indicated that hypoxic maintenance of P. carinii resulted in decreased transcription of several genes involved in sterol and lipid biosynthesis suggesting that while hypoxic conditions down-regulated genes involved in sterol biosynthesis, down-regulation of sterol biosynthesis is not a requirement for sterol scavenging in P. carinii. The ability of P. carinii to scavenge exogenous sterols under normal O2 tensions at which the sterol pathway is unaffected provides evidence that sterol scavenging may be the primary means that P. carinii utilizes to obtain its sterols.
