University of St Andrews Research Portal
Not a member yet
81329 research outputs found
Sort by
Don't forget the snacks:doing field research as a parent
No full textThis chapter reflects on the experiences – challenges, opportunities, considerations, consequences – of conducting field research as a parent. Through a series of reflections on and from field research, we locate our individual experiences as part of a broader conversation about conducting academic field research while a parent – and various decisions that need to be made, compromises reached, barriers faced, and benefits realised. As the experiences recounted here demonstrate, there is no single way of approaching field research as a parent, and each circumstance requires specific decisions to be made and options to be assessed. Crucially, there remains a need for funders and institutions to better recognise and accommodate the diverse and shifting needs of parents (and other carers) in a career that often demands field research as a core component
Editorial: Metabolic alterations in cancer:from targeting metabolism to cancer detection
No full textGrantmaking foundations and place-based leadership:the opportunities and challenges of relational philanthropy within place
No full textAccompanying a strong interest in, and emphasis on, place-based philanthropy across UK-based foundations, their networks, associations, and relevant infrastructure and support organisations, there is a growing recognition and acknowledgement of the complexities, trade-offs and challenges associated with undertaking a place-based approach. Adopting the lens of place-based leadership, this chapter uses the case of the Rank Foundation to critically examine their approaching to engaging with place from both a grantmaker and a grantee perspective. The chapter reviews the potential role of relational philanthropy within place-based approaches to grantmaking and raises questions of philanthropy’s role and potential in community development
Insights into new mechanosensitive behaviors of G protein-coupled receptors
No full textG protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) represent a diverse and vital family of membrane proteins that mediate intracellular signaling in response to extracellular stimuli, playing critical roles in physiology and disease. Traditionally recognized as chemical signal transducers, GPCRs have recently been implicated in mechanotransduction, the process of converting mechanical stimuli into cellular responses. This review explores the emerging role of GPCRs in sensing and responding to mechanical forces, with a particular focus on the cardiovascular system. Cardiovascular homeostasis is heavily influenced by mechanical forces such as shear stress, cyclic stretch, and pressure, which are central to both normal physiology and the pathogenesis of diseases such as hypertension and atherosclerosis. GPCRs, including the angiotensin II type 1 receptor (AT1R) and the β2-adrenergic receptor (β2-AR), have demonstrated the ability to integrate mechanical and chemical signals, potentially through conformational changes and/or modulation of lipid interactions, leading to biased signaling. Recent studies highlight the dual activation mechanisms of GPCRs, with β2-AR now serving as a key example of how mechanical and ligand-dependent pathways contribute to cardiovascular regulation. This review synthesizes current knowledge of GPCR mechanosensitivity, emphasizing its implications for cardiovascular health and disease, and explores advancements in methodologies poised to further unravel the mechanistic intricacies of these receptors
Symmetry breaking in the subgraph isomorphism problem
No full textThe Subgraph Isomorphism Problem (SIP) asks whether a given graph occurs within another. Despite being theoretically difficult, SIP can be solved quickly in practice. Symmetry breaking identifies symmetric states during the search process, and avoids searching all of them. Symmetry breaking has been shown to be useful in reducing runtimes for constraint programming, but there are many varied approaches with nuanced differences. It is unclear which symmetry breaking technique is "best" for SIP. We present various symmetry breaking techniques with a focus on influencing constraints to reflect the search order, and study the efficacy of each. Initial experimental data indicates significant speed-up over the solver with no symmetry breaking, and proposed improvements to basic techniques yield strong practical gains
Unpacking the temporal complexity of transnational processes
No full textIn this paper we examine two national university fields embarking on the transnational transition towards Open Access publishing at different times with different approaches. Our findings show different paths in each national field which unfold a different form of temporality. Without directly collaborating on the transition, the national field paths influenced each other through perturbation impulses from one field to the other which changed the overarching transnational trajectory. Based on these findings our study contributes to the scholarly understanding of the temporal complexity of transnational dynamics in nested organizational fields
Evaluating the reliability and consistency of a custom GPT-4-based marker of student assignments
No full text
Efficient approximations of transcriptional bursting effects on the dynamics of a gene regulatory network
No full textMathematical models of gene regulatory networks are widely used to study cell fate changes and transcriptional regulation. When designing such models, it is important to accurately account for sources of stochasticity. However, doing so can be computationally expensive and analytically untractable, posing limits on the extent of our explorations and on parameter inference. Here, we explore this challenge using the example of a simple auto-negative feedback motif, in which we incorporate stochastic variation due to transcriptional bursting and noise from finite copy numbers. We find that transcriptional bursting may change the qualitative dynamics of the system by inducing oscillations when they would not otherwise be present, or by magnifying existing oscillations. We describe multiple levels of approximation for the model in the form of differential equations, piecewise-deterministic processes and stochastic differential equations. Importantly, we derive how the classical chemical Langevin equation can be extended to include a noise term representing transcriptional bursting. This approximation drastically decreases computation times and allows us to analytically calculate properties of the dynamics, such as their power spectrum. We explore when these approximations break down and provide recommendations for their use. Our analysis illustrates the importance of accounting for transcriptional bursting when simulating gene regulatory network dynamics and provides recommendations to do so with computationally efficient methods
Hollywood is burning:imagery and polycrisis
No full textIn early January 2025, wildfires swept through several regions of Los Angeles, California. The fires' proximity to Hollywood, the epicentre of Western visual and cinematic production, lead to the creation and wide circulation of real and artificially generated images on social media. In this article, I argue two things: first, that these images capture human concerns in the age of polycrisis; and second, by interpreting these images as symptoms of an attempt to articulate a sense of reality in which human imagination has itself become under threat, public humanists of the present and future need to be attuned to their role as mediators of diverse publics and their way of making sense under these crisis conditions. This article thus uses selected imagery of Los Angeles's wildfires circulating on social media to excavate how ways of meaning-making in a digital age (memeification, use of generative artificial intelligence) reflect real public concerns about polycrisis, rendering these images productive beyond their satirical or misinforming values