University of Georgia

About: University of Georgia is a education organization based out in Athens, Georgia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 41934 authors who have published 93622 publications receiving 3713212 citations. The organization is also known as: UGA & Franklin College.

Photochemical source of biological substrates in sea water: implications for carbon cycling

Abstract: DISSOLVED organic carbon (DOC) in sea water represents one of the largest reservoirs of carbon on the earth1. The main fraction of this DOC is generally believed to be composed of old2, biologi-cally refractory material3 such as humic substances, for which the removal mechanisms remain largely unknown. One potentially important removal process in the ocean that has not been investi-gated is the photochemical breakdown of this DOC in the photic zone to form biologically labile organic products. Here we show that biological uptake of pyruvate is highly correlated to its rate of photochemical production in sea water (r = 0.964), and that the photochemical precursor(s) of pyruvate is from the fraction of DOC having a nominal molecular weight of 500. This is the first evidence that photochemical breakdown of high-molecular-weight marine DOC, which is presumably biologically refractory, results in the production of a compound that is used by plankton as a substrate. Our results have important implications for the oceanic carbon cycle, particularly with respect to planktonic-food-web dynamics and the global carbon budget.

Research collaboration in universities and academic entrepreneurship: the-state-of-the-art

Abstract: There is abundant evidence that research collaboration has become the norm in every field of scientific and technical research. We provide a critical overview of the literature on research collaboration, focusing particularly on individual-level collaborations among university researchers, but we also give attention to university researchers’ collaborations with researchers in other sectors, including industry. We consider collaborations aimed chiefly at expanding the base of knowledge (knowledge-focused collaborations) as well as ones focused on production of economic value and wealth (property-focused collaborations), the latter including most academic entrepreneurship research collaborations. To help organize our review we develop a framework for analysis, one that considers attributes of collaborators, collaborative process and organization characteristics as the affect collaboration choices and outcomes. In addition, we develop and use a “Propositional Table for Research Collaboration Literature,” presented as an “Appendix” to this study. We conclude with some suggestions for possible improvement in research on collaboration including: (1) more attention to multiple levels of analysis and the interactions among them; (2) more careful measurement of impacts as opposed to outputs; (3) more studies on ‘malpractice’ in collaboration, including exploitation; (4) increased attention to collaborators’ motives and the social psychology of collaborative teams.

Managerial Strategies and Behavior in Networks: A Model with Evidence from U.S. Public Education *

Abstract: This manuscript provides the first systematic test of a formal theory of managing government programs in a network context (see O’Toole and Meier 1999) Using data from several hundred school districts in Texas, we create a measure of network management that reflects the time school superintendents interact with several sets of significant actors in the environment We find that network management is not only related to overall organizationalit has positive impacts even in the presence of a lagged dependent variable Further, management appears to interact with other organizational resources in a nonlinear manner to further augment organizational performance Although public school networks are not as complicated or as populated as those of many other public organizations, the findings suggest how management might matter in these other networks

Information exchange and use in group decision making: you can lead a group to information, but you can't make it think

Abstract: Organizations often build groups with members from different areas so that a wider range of information and opinions can be considered. When members of such groups share the information they have, the group as a whole can access a larger pool of information than any one member acting alone, potentially enabling them to make better decisions. This experiment studied groups working on a hidden profile task in which each participant received different (but not conflicting) information about the task, which they needed to combine to identify the optimal decision. Verbally interacting groups exchanged only a small portion of the available information and made poor decisions as a result. Groups interacting using a GSS exchanged about 50% more information, providing sufficient information to enable all groups to identify the optimal decision. However, GSS groups did not accurately process this information -- only one GSS group chose the optimal decision. Possible explanations for this lack of information processing are that participants were unable to integrate into their existing base of information the information received during discussions, that the way in which the GSS was used impeded information processing, that the anonymity and delayed feedback in the GSS reduced the credibility of new information so that participants chose not to process it, or that information in the GSS was less salient than verbally contributed information.

Unexpected consequences of a sudden and massive transposon amplification on rice gene expression

Abstract: High-copy-number transposable elements comprise the majority of eukaryotic genomes where they are major contributors to gene and genome evolution. However, it remains unclear how a host genome can survive a rapid burst of hundreds or thousands of insertions because such bursts are exceedingly rare in nature and therefore difficult to observe in real time. In a previous study we reported that in a few rice strains the DNA transposon mPing was increasing its copy number by approximately 40 per plant per generation. Here we exploit the completely sequenced rice genome to determine 1,664 insertion sites using high-throughput sequencing of 24 individual rice plants and assess the impact of insertion on the expression of 710 genes by comparative microarray analysis. We find that the vast majority of transposable element insertions either upregulate or have no detectable effect on gene transcription. This modest impact reflects a surprising avoidance of exon insertions by mPing and a preference for insertion into 5' flanking sequences of genes. Furthermore, we document the generation of new regulatory networks by a subset of mPing insertions that render adjacent genes stress inducible. As such, this study provides evidence for models first proposed previously for the involvement of transposable elements and other repetitive sequences in genome restructuring and gene regulation.