Abstract—Time lapse microscopy has emerged as an important modality for studying human embryo development, as mitosis events can provide insight into embryo health and fate. Mi-tosis detection can happen through tracking of embryonic cells (tracking based), or from low level image features

to track the deformation of the embryonic tis-sue and then uses changes in intensity at tracked regions to identify the locations of mitosis. On a one hundred minute image sequence, consisting of twenty images, the algorithm successfully detected eighty-one out of the ninety-five mi-tosis. The performance

that Smad4 was a direct target of miR-146a. The expression levels of miR-146a, Smad4 and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) were quantified by quantitative reverse transcription PCR and/or western blot analysis. The effects of miR-146a on apoptosis were detected by Annexin V-fluorescein isothiocya

of five marker proteins involved in the hypo-thetical PERK-eIF2α-ATF2 pathway were detected, namely PERK, phosphorylated PERK (P-PERK), eIF2α, phosphory-lated eIF2α (P-eIF2α) and ATF2. An increase in the collective expression levels of these proteins would indicate that apop-tosis was induced

;s ability to prevent both insulin-dependent mitosis and apop-tosis. Collectively, these studies suggest that P4 mediates its anti-mitotic and anti-apoptotic effects through this 60-kDa P4BP, which has GABAA receptor-like properties and is localized with-in the surface membrane of GCs.

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In this thesis, two sets of experimental studies in bosonic and fermionic gases are described. In the first part of the thesis, itinerant ferromagnetism was studied in a strongly interacting Fermi gas of ultracold atoms. The observation of nonmonotonic behavior of lifetime, kinetic energy, and size for increasing repulsive interactions pro-vides strong evidence for a phase transition to a ferromagnetic state. Our observations imply that itinerant ferromagnetism of delocalized fermions is possible without lattice and band structure, and our data validate the most basic model for ferromagnetism introduced by Stoner. In the second part of the thesis, the coherence properties of a Bose-Einstein con-densate (BEC) was studied in a radio frequency induced double-well potential imple-mented on a microfabricated atom chip. We observed phase coherence between the separated condensates for times up to 200 ms after splitting, a factor of 10 longer than the phase diffusion time expected for a coherent state for our experimental con-ditions. The enhanced coherence time is attributed to number squeezing of the initial