Scholarworks

ScholarWorks is an open access repository for the capture of the intellectual work of Montana State University (MSU) in support of its teaching, research and service missions. MSU ScholarWorks is a central point of discovery for accessing, collecting, sharing, preserving, and distributing knowledge to the Montana State University community and the world.

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Scholarship & Research

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A taxonomic revision of Aureobasidium (Saccotheciaceae, Dothideales) with new species, new names, and typifications
(Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute, 2025-01) Jumbam, Blaise; Zasada, Inga A.; Bensch, Konstanze; Crous, P. W.; Aime, M. Catherine
Aureobasidium comprises dimorphic yeast-like fungi that usually produce melanised cells at maturity. Species are globally distributed and ubiquitous, colonizing a variety of habitats. At present, ca 40 species are accepted, with the type, A. pullulans, representing a complex of unresolved cryptic species. In this study, we isolated 128 Aureobasidium from multiple temperate and tropical regions. We performed multigene analyses using eight loci (ITS, 28S, EF1a, ELO2, RPB2, BTUB, mtLSU and mtSSU) on new isolates and including sequences from type material for all available Aureobasidium species. Data on growth, physiological profiles, micro‘ and macromorphological attributes were also collected and analysed. Several DNA-based species delimitation methods were evaluated for their ability to delimit species. We found that assimilation of D-quinic acid, L-sorbose, D-mannitol, gluconolactone, erythritol, L-arabinose, and sodium succinate dibasic hexahydrate were important in delineating species of Aureobasidium and note that production of pigmentation in culture often takes longer than the 14 d standard for carbon assimilations. Genealogical concordance phylogenetic species recognition criteria (GCPSR) provided the most consistent results for species delimitation. We describe nine new species of Aureobasidium (A. albui, A. cavalettoi, A. diazvalderramae, A. ellingtonae, A. essambei, A. peruvianum, A. rubi, A. toomeae, and A. vanuatuense), make new combinations for A. aubasidani (= A. pullulans var. aubasidani), A. fermentans (= Pullularia fermentans), and A. mahoniae (= Selenophoma mahoniae), validate and provide descriptions for A. musti and A. uvarum, and provide lecto‘ and epitypes for Dematium pullulans, the basionym of A. pullulans. Finally, we resolved the phylogeny for Aureobasidium, reduce Kabatiella (based on K. microsticta) to synonymy, and provide an updated list of species to facilitate future studies.
Tokenomics: Challenges for All-Female Founding teams in accelerator cohorts
(Elsevier BV, 2025-04) Kwapisz, Agnieszka; Hechavarria, Diana M.
Prior research attributes gender disparities in venture capital to investor bias and gendered evaluation criteria, yet these studies do not explain why accelerators—designed to reduce such biases—yield mixed results for all-female teams. We identify an overlooked factor: accelerator cohort gender composition. Using data from the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative (GALI), we examine how the proportion of all-female teams within an accelerator affects post-acceleration funding outcomes. Drawing on tokenism theory, we show that higher proportions of all-female teams exacerbate rather than mitigate funding disadvantages through visibility, contrast, and assimilation mechanisms. As the share of all-female teams increases, these teams experience heightened scrutiny, isolation from investor networks, and pressure to conform to stereotypes, further restricting access to equity, philanthropic contributions, and new debt. These findings challenge the assumption that increasing women’s representation improves funding outcomes and highlight the need for accelerator redesign to foster equity.
Workforce Implications From Farm Automation
(Wiley, 2025-07) Hill, Alexandra; Charlton, Diane; Taylor, Edward
US agriculture is evolving rapidly, especially with the development of new and more complex labor-saving technologies. This study overviews the workforce implications of agricultural automation, including those for employment, wages, job quality, and more. Contrary to beliefs that automation reduces employment, we show that automation can raise employment and wages by increasing farm production and creating higher-paid and more desirable jobs in complementary sectors. These workforce implications are mediated by the factors that drive adoption and how effects permeate across the agri-food system, suggesting that governments play a key role in ensuring positive workforce outcomes through policymaking and funding allocations.
The Temperature Dependence of the Langmuir Adsorption Model for a Single-Site Metal–Organic Framework
(American Chemical Society, 2025-04) Compton, Dalton; Chiu, Nan-Chieh; Stylianou, Kyriakos C.; Stadie, Nicholas P.
The single-site Langmuir adsorption model, also known as the Langmuir isotherm equation, is one of the simplest possible descriptions of adsorption phenomena and yet finds widespread applicability across a range of disciplines. In its simplest form, it is deployed to treat adsorption equilibria at constant temperature (i.e., along isotherms); however, at the heart of its derivation is a more general class of models that each incorporates an explicit temperature dependence, subject to assumptions about the spatial/translational degrees of freedom of the adsorbed species. In this work, measurements of the temperature dependence of supercritical adsorption of H2 on a single-site metal–organic framework (MOF) are presented and fitted using a range of Langmuir models with distinct treatments of degrees of freedom in the adsorbed phase. Surprisingly, all of the models can be used to adequately represent the measured data (to within 0.0003 mmol g–1 per point), despite yielding significantly different values for binding energy and the temperature dependence of the isosteric enthalpy of adsorption (i.e., the isosteric heat, qst). However, a critical finding of this work is that the mean-temperature isosteric enthalpy of adsorption remains consistent across all models within experimental error (±0.1% or <0.1 kJ mol–1), highlighting its reliability for evaluating adsorption thermodynamics.
Environmentally-grown aerobic granular sludge performs more complete pharmaceutical biodegradation and wastewater treatment than lab-grown granules
(Elsevier BV, 2025-04) Bodle, Kylie B.; Kirkland, Catherine M.
This study evaluated pharmaceutical removal by environmentally-grown aerobic granular sludge (AGS). Most pharmaceutical treatment studies utilize lab-grown AGS, which is cultivated from activated sludge flocs on synthetic media and therefore is likely to possess different physical and microbiological properties than its real-world counterpart. For approximately 70 days, a 60 μg/L mixture of gemfibrozil, diclofenac, and erythromycin was fed to environmentally-grown AGS. Wastewater treatment, granule characteristics, and pharmaceutical fate were monitored. Environmentally-grown granules outperformed their lab-grown counterparts in multiple ways: environmental granules were physically unimpacted by pharmaceuticals, phosphate removal remained complete, and all nitrogen removal processes were unaffected except ammonia oxidation, which was temporarily inhibited by approximately 35%. Most importantly, gemfibrozil was completely biodegraded, a result yet to be observed in any AGS study. Diclofenac and erythromycin removal were minimal and generally below 10%. The families J111, Xanthomonadaceae, OLB5, and Weeksellaceae were uniquely identified as pharmaceutical degraders. Results suggest that environmentally-grown AGS contains rare, but essential, microbial community members missing from lab-grown granules, and these communities enhance environmental granules’ resilience during pharmaceutical exposure. Altogether, this study demonstrates that lab-grown AGS may not accurately model the functional capacity of its real-world counterparts.