Del Mar College

Abstract: One fact often overlooked in discussing the retention issue is that not everyone who fails to return to school is a dropout. Some persons return after an absence of a semester or more; they can be called stopouts. Some intended to take only a few classes and stop attending when they accomplish their educational goals; they can be called optouts. The only persons who should be labeled dropouts are those who failed to accomplish their educational goal and have no definite plans to accomplish it later. During the 1990‐91 school year, Del Mar College (DMC) and the Texas A&M Adult and Extension Education program developed and executed a plan to identify, count, and interview nonreturnees at DMC. The purposes of the study were toprovide DMC with baseline data on its nonreturnees and to test the feasibility of gathering interview information by telephone. Stopouts far outnumbered dropouts and optouts among respondents, with 303 of 399 nonreturnees identifying themselves as such. In this article, we define releva...

Abstract: Mycobacteriophages – viruses of mycobacterial hosts – are genetically diverse but morphologically are all classified in the Caudovirales with double-stranded DNA and tails. We describe here a group of five closely related mycobacteriophages – Corndog, Catdawg, Dylan, Firecracker, and YungJamal – designated as Cluster O with long flexible tails but with unusual prolate capsids. Proteomic analysis of phage Corndog particles, Catdawg particles, and Corndog-infected cells confirms expression of half of the predicted gene products and indicates a non-canonical mechanism for translation of the Corndog tape measure protein. Bioinformatic analysis identifies 8–9 strongly predicted SigA promoters and all five Cluster O genomes contain more than 30 copies of a 17 bp repeat sequence with dyad symmetry located throughout the genomes. Comparison of the Cluster O phages provides insights into phage genome evolution including the processes of gene flux by horizontal genetic exchange.