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BACKGROUND: Zika virus poses a severe health threat to pregnant women, yet few public health responses thus far have addressed barriers to behavior change to reduce mosquito-borne and/or sexual spread. Zika’s effects are most severe for pregnant women, who are unlikely to be using a barrier method during pregnancy. Pregnant women are commonly aware that Zika is transmitted by mosquitos, but not that sexual transmission is a secondary route. The potential role of intimate partner violence in preventing the sexual spread of Zika (i.e., via condom use negotiation) is not well understood and has not been addressed in prevention education. Women in the U.S.-Mexico border region of Arizona represent one key population that may be at risk of a future Zika epidemic. Mobile health (mHealth) outreach is ideal to engage this population as it provides participants with flexibility and privacy commensurate with sensitivity to discussing topics such as sexual activity or birth defects. OBJECTIVES: This dissertation is composed from three studies that address the following aims: 1) to assess existing mHealth interventions to reduce or mitigate IPV in any form, including sexual assault and coercion, physical violence, and emotional control or abuse, any of which may influence successful engagement in Zika prevention behaviors; 2) to estimate the population-level dissemination of public health information throughout Arizona on the sexual transmissibility of Zika to women who were pregnant or intending to become pregnant during the 2016-2017 epidemic; 3) to identify factors that influence mosquito bite risk and subjective condom use norms among Spanish-speaking Mexican-origin women in a Zika risk area, as well as preferences for mobile message delivery. METHODS: A systematic literature search was conducted for Aim 1 to synthesize existing efforts to address intimate partner violence victimization using mobile or other web-based programs. Aim 2 included a quantitative analysis of data

This thesis focuses on the discovery of full-length mRNA transcripts in Bos taurus spermatozoa. The primary aim of this study is to identify and validate full-length mRNA primarily from RNA-Sequencing of bovine spermatozoa. The secondary aim is to determine if full-length spermatozoal transcripts are delivered to the oocyte at fertlilization, allowing for future studies to track their inheritance from paternal sources to the embryo. The main hypothesis of this thesis is that full-length mRNA transcripts exist within the spermatozoal transcript profile in Bos taurus. The secondary hypothesis is that if spermatozoal mRNA is functional after fertilization, then full-length transcripts should be present in the early stage embryo. To examine these hypotheses, this thesis is divided into three main chapters. The first is a literature review, discussing the process of spermatogenesis, the unique properties of spermatozoal mRNAs, including some hypothesized functions of spermatozoal mRNAs. A summary of a new technique, RNA-Sequencing, will be discussed in this review as well as comparisons to previous literature techniques for identifying mRNA transcripts of interest. The second chapter is the manuscript published in the journal Biology of Reproduction in January 2013, co-first-authored by Christopher Card. This manuscript uses the technique RNA-Seq to examine the transcript profile of nine Bos taurus bulls, and highlights several transcripts of interest for further study. This study found 6,166 total transcripts, and performed Gene Ontology analysis of the transcripts to categorize them into functional categories for further examination, the top most category of interest being translation. The third chapter of this thesis is a manuscript in preparation, formatted for submission to the journal of Molecular Reproduction and Development. This manuscript evaluates twenty four target mRNA transcripts to see if they are full-length. These transcripts were identified through four