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Wheat glutamine synthetase TaGSr-4B is a candidate gene for a QTL of thousand grain weight on chromosome 4B
Get PDFA QTL for thousand grain weight (TGW) in wheat was previously mapped on chromosome 4B in a DH population of Westonia × Kauz. For identifying the candidate genes of the QTL, wheat 90 K SNP array was used to saturate the existing linkage map, and four field trials plus one glasshouse experiment over five locations were conducted to refine the QTL. Three nitrogen levels were applied to two of those field trials, resulting in a TGW phenotype data set from nine environments. A robust TGW QTL cluster including 773 genes was detected in six environments with the highest LOD value of 13.4. Based on differentiate gene expression within the QTL cluster in an RNAseq data of Westonia and Kauz during grain filling, a glutamine synthesis gene (GS: TaGSr-4B) was selected as a potential candidate gene for the QTL. A SNP on the promoter region between Westonia and Kauz was used to develop a cleaved amplified polymorphic marker for TaGSr-4B gene mapping and QTL reanalysing. As results, TGW QTL appeared in seven environments, and in four out of seven environments, the TGW QTL were localized on the TaGSr-4B locus and showed significant contributions to the phenotype. Based on the marker, two allele groups of Westonia and Kauz formed showed significant differences on TGW in eight environments. In agreement with the roles of GS genes on nitrogen and carbon remobilizations, TaGSr-4B is likely the candidate gene of the TGW QTL on 4B and the TaGSr-4B gene marker is ready for wheat breeding
Reap the crop wild relatives for breeding future crops
Get PDFCrop wild relatives (CWRs) have provided breeders with several 'game-changing' traits or genes that have boosted crop resilience and global agricultural production. Advances in breeding and genomics have accelerated the identification of valuable CWRs for use in crop improvement. The enhanced genetic diversity of breeding pools carrying optimum combinations of favorable alleles for targeted crop-growing regions is crucial to sustain genetic gain. In parallel, growing sequence information on wild genomes in combination with precise gene-editing tools provide a fast-track route to transform CWRs into ideal future crops. Data-informed germplasm collection and management strategies together with adequate policy support will be equally important to improve access to CWRs and their sustainable use to meet food and nutrition security targets
Supporting urban ecosystem services across terrestrial, marine and freshwater realms
No full textThe terrestrial, freshwater and marine realms all provide essential ecosystem services in urban environments. However, the services provided by each realm are often considered independently, which ignores the synergies between them and risks underestimating the benefits derived collectively. Greater research collaboration across these realms, and an integrated approach to management decisions can help to support urban developments and restoration projects in maintaining or enhancing ecosystem services. The aim of this paper is to highlight the synergies and trade-offs among ecosystem services provided by each realm and to offer suggestions on how to improve current practice. We use case studies to illustrate the flow of services across realms. In our call to better integrate research and management across realms, we present a framework that provides a 6-step process for conducting collaborative research and management with an Australian perspective. Our framework considers unifying language, sharing, and understanding of desired outcomes, conducting cost-benefit analyses to minimise trade-offs, using multiple modes of communication for stakeholders, and applying research outcomes to inform regulation. It can be applied to improve collaboration among researchers, managers and planners from all realms, leading to strategic allocation of resources, increased protection of urban natural resources and improved environmental regulation with broad public support
Perceptions of Australian cattle farmers regarding the impact of pinkeye on farm productivity and animal welfare
No full textPinkeye (infectious bovine keratoconjunctivitis, IBK) is an important disease of cattle worldwide. It has a substantial negative impact on farm productivity and is a major cost burden, but specific data on losses are lacking. This study was conducted to understand farmers’ perceptions of the impact of pinkeye on farm productivity and animal welfare, and factors influencing the money farmers estimated spending on pinkeye in 2018. Data were collected by the first Australia-wide online survey on pinkeye. There were 1035 suitable responses analysed for impact on farm productivity. From these 82% of respondents represented farms in southern Australia, 58% reported cattle breeding as their main enterprise, and 89% bred animals on farm. Farmers were more likely to rank the impact of pinkeye on farm productivity as high if they had younger cattle, treated cattle with pinkeye more frequently, and as their herd size increased. Fewer farmers chose pinkeye as an animal welfare concern than as an economic and farm management issue, but overall animal welfare was rated by the greatest number of farmers as a high severity concern (n = 691), followed by decreased sale value and farm profits (n = 561). This suggests a shift in the equipoise between the economics of food animal production and animal welfare expectations. The median amount reportedly spent on pinkeye in 2018 by Australian farmers (n = 779) was $250.00 per farm. Farmers reported spending more money on pinkeye as herd size and number of cattle affected by pinkeye increased, their perception of pinkeye impact on farm productivity and animal welfare increased, if they treated pinkeye more frequently, reported higher fly worry, if their herds contained Angus cattle, if they bred on farm, and if they were located in southern Australian regions. Study findings should be used to better understand pinkeye, target expenditure, and improve outcomes for cattle and farmers
Characterising a sarcoptic mange epizootic in quenda (Isoodon fusciventer)
Get PDFSarcoptic mange, a parasitic skin disease caused by Sarcoptes scabiei, is an emerging conservation threat to some Australian wildlife species. As a zoonotic and multi-host disease, it has the capacity to exploit different hosts, creating management challenges for susceptible wildlife populations that may suffer high rates of morbidity and mortality. Sarcoptic mange was identified in quenda (Isoodon fusciventer) in a peri-urban region of Perth, Western Australia in 2019. By mid-2021, reported cases were distributed across 107ha. This retrospective study reviews the spatiotemporal distribution, clinical signs and risk factors for sarcoptic mange in quenda from a metropolitan region. Preliminary epidemiological parameters for the outbreak are described, including period prevalence of infested individuals, spatiotemporal analyses, clinical signs of mange, and preliminary risk factor analyses. The period prevalence of sarcoptic mange between July 1, 2019 and June 30, 2021 was 26.9% (CI 95%; 21.2, 33.5) with a mortality rate of 39.6%, owing to severity of disease or secondary complications. Sarcoptic mange was detected more frequently in adult quenda than juveniles (OR: 176.8, CI 95%: 10.7, 2930.1), with adult males more affected than adult females (OR: 3.5, CI 95%: 1.5, 8.4). Clinical signs of disease presented on the rump and tail (100%), followed by the limbs and digits (61.5%). The most common clinical signs recorded were alopecia (92.3%), erythema (46.2%) and open wounds (42.3%). This is the first documented example of a geographically expanding and propagating epizootic of sarcoptic mange in quenda, with implicit welfare and conservation concerns for the species, alongside potential for cases in humans and domestic species that cohabit with or handle quenda in the urban environment. Further, the detection of cases through wildlife rehabilitation centres highlights the critical role such organisations play in conservation and passive surveillance for wildlife diseases of conservation or public and domestic animal health importance
AI models of video and email traffic for anticipatory networking
Get PDFAs the number of applications available over the Internet rapidly grows, providing services with high Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) becomes an increasingly critical issue for wired and wireless networks. Email is one of the most successful applications and has remained a principal communication channel, both in enterprise and social settings. In addition, the demand for multimedia services, especially streaming content such as video and high-definition television, video conferencing, user-generated video and video-based social networking, which are characterized by high burstiness and large bandwidth requirements, has rapidly increased to the point of video becoming the dominant type of network traffic.
The work in this thesis falls into the research area of anticipatory networking. It addresses, via three studies, the need to improve the modelling of email and video traffic towards accurately predicting future traffic loads and hence achieving high bandwidth utilization with improved QoS.
The first focuses on the understanding of email traffic workload properties and patterns. It provides a comprehensive comparison between the performance of recurrent neural networks (RNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) models and demonstrates that both approaches can achieve high modelling accuracy, outperforming existing work, over four large datasets acquired from different universities’ servers.
To handle the burstiness of video traffic in ways that will improve users’ satisfaction while also achieving high utilization of network resources, prediction of video frame sizes can play a significant role. The second study focuses on accurate traffic prediction for videos encoded with H.264 and H.265, which are major state-of-the-art standards. Our work uses single-step and multi-step approaches to capture the long-range dependence and short-range dependence properties of variable bit rate video traces and evaluates the accuracy of LSTM, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Sequence-to-Sequence (seq2seq) models and compares them with existing approaches, outperforming them in accuracy for a variety of videos.
The third study uses the work of the second in order to focus on the problem of policing video traffic from H.264 and H.265 sources. Building on work that has shown that classicAI Model of Video and Email Traffic for Anticipatory Networking traffic policing schemes can lead to unnecessarily strict policing for conforming video sources, we propose the use of Artificial Intelligence – based traffic policing schemes for video traffic. We propose mechanisms that are shown to clearly outperform both the widely used token bucket mechanism and other mechanisms from the literature, when used on conforming and non-conforming video users
Genetic improvement of heat stress tolerance in cereal crops
Get PDFCrop heat stress is a threat to food supply, with heatwaves expected to increase in frequency and intensity globally. In addition to yield loss, heat stress dramatically reduces fertility and seed-setting rate, grain quality and weight, and seed germination and growth. Genetic variability for heat stress tolerance can be used in breeding programs to develop tolerant genotypes. The availability of genome assemblies with high-confidence sequences for many cereal crops, including rice, maize, wheat and barley, now allows the identification of heat stress tolerance-associated genes and gene networks. This review focuses on synthesizing current advances in understanding the detrimental effects of heat stress on cereal crop production at the physiological and genetic levels. It provides an account of available genomic resources, genetic variation, candidate genes, and molecular markers for heat stress tolerance. Lastly, this review offers insight into crop genetic improvement for heat stress tolerance, including germplasm screening in glasshouse and field trials, marker-assisted selection, mapping genomic loci and identification of candidate genes, and genomic-assisted breeding
Exploring school adaptations to the challenges of educating in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic provided a world-wide opportunity for educators and educational structures to be evaluated (Margolis, 2020; McLeod & Dulsky, 2021). The demands placed on both schools and their communities to suddenly switch to a remote learning mode, revealed that many challenges, both procedural and relational, were associated with such a move (Lorenc et al., 2021).
This qualitative descriptive case study explored how a school procedurally and relationally responded to the challenges of educating during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Two cohorts (leaders and teachers) of a school community were sampled via semi-structured interviews to establish the depth and diversity of perspectives and experiences. Teachers and leaders who participated in the interviews described a mixture of procedural and relational foci in their educational responses they used to instil a sense of familiarity with their students and parents and with each other. Challenges described within these responses revolved around themes of communication, leadership decision making and resourcing during the crisis, with all participants noting aspects of time pressure and fatigue as extenuating factors.
This study’s findings indicated that the disruption of COVID-19 to traditional educational community structures allowed for a shift in procedural and relational responses by the school community. Educational leaders in the case study school were given a chance to reshape their institution into a more reflexive community and model new practice architectures that would be relevant to future crises in their particular situation. This study also proposes a conceptual framework that elevates teacher agency in decision-making protocols as well as provide new insights for universities, education departments, professional authorities and schools that are endeavouring to assist their communities during times of educational crisis
The Vice Chancellor in Australian Universities: Understanding Leadership Beyond ‘Bad Apples’ and ‘Unicorns’
Get PDFLeadership in Australian higher education has confronted crises, threats, restructures, and embarrassment. From sexual harassment claims to nepotism, regulatory authorities have investigated individual Vice Chancellors and their behaviour. Such crises reveal the consequences of decision making and appointment processes. While COVID-19 demonstrated the institutional reliance on international students to ensure financial security, these weaknesses existed long before the pandemic. Through this troubled time, are there patterns or priorities that ‘create’ a Vice Chancellorship? How do researchers understand leadership in our universities, beyond ‘a few bad apples’ – to describe the excesses and improprieties – or the ‘unicorns’ that have trotted the golden path to success? This article arches beyond the individual cases that become tabloidized headlines. Instead, we probe if there are shared characteristics among Vice Chancellors, evaluating how career progression emerges in the higher education sector. This article also assesses the consequences of this leadership pathway on universities, particularly for building a post-pandemic future
Acetamiprid fate in a sandy loam with contrasting soil organic matter contents: A comparison of the degradation, sorption and leaching of commercial neonicotinoid formulations
No full textThe impacts of neonicotinoids have generally focussed on the responses of the pure active ingredient. Using a selection of two commercial formulations and the active ingredient, we ran three laboratory studies using 14C-labelled acetamiprid to study the leaching, sorption and mineralisation behaviours of the commercially available neonicotinoid formulations compared to the pure active ingredient. We added 14C-spiked acetamiprid to a sandy loam soil that had received long-term additions of farmyard manure at two rates (10 t/ha/yr and 25 t/ha/yr) and mineral fertilisers, as a control. We found significant differences in acetamiprid mineralisation across both the SOM and chemical treatments. Sorption was primarily impacted by changes in SOM and any differences in leachate recovery were much less significant across both treatment types. The mineralisation of all pesticide formulations was comparatively slow, with <23 % of any given chemical/soil organic matter combination being mineralised over the experimental period. The highest mineralisation rates occurred in samples with the highest soil organic matter levels. The results also showed that 82.9 % ± 1.6 % of the acetamiprid applied was leached from the soil during repeated simulated rainfall events. This combined with the low sorption values, and the low rates of mineralisation, implies that acetamiprid is highly persistent and mobile within sandy soils. As a highly persistent neurotoxin with high invertebrate selectivity, the presence of neonicotinoids in soil presents a high toxicology risk to various beneficial soil organisms, including earthworms, as well as being at high risk of transfer to surrounding watercourses