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Microalgal biofilm cultivation systems for enhanced biomass production
No full textAbstract not currently available
From East to West and back again: A critical review of the cross-cultural consumption, collecting and historiography of Chinese ‘classic’ furniture from the Ming and early Qing dynasties
Get PDFChinese hardwood furniture enjoyed a renaissance during the twentieth century that saw furniture objects become an important part of national, public and private collections. Desirability among collectors and connoisseurs continues to increase as the significance and appreciation for classical Chinese furniture intensifies. Whilst the prominence and popularity of refined Chinese hardwood furniture has risen with alacrity, the art-historical discourse as it is understood both outside and within China was principally constructed through historiography formed in books on the subject published by Western writers during the first half of the twentieth century.
This thesis documents the cultural consumption, appreciation and collection of furniture made during the Ming and early Qing dynasties, between 1368 and 1735; a period described as the apex of Chinese furniture production. The research addresses the historiography and collecting of classic Chinese furniture, commencing in Europe and China in the 1920s and 30s when furniture from China for domestic use became of interest to Western collectors and scholars alike, with reference to the interpretation and consumption of furniture at the time of its making. The early Western pioneers of Chinese furniture were fundamental in disseminating a taste for elegant and deceptively simple Chinese furniture which placed it on a global platform and elevated furniture from fine craft to art object.
Despite its significance, the collecting and literature of Chinese historic furniture has not been subject to comprehensive academic review and remains to be critically examined in its entirety from historiographical and a theoretical perspective. The thesis systemises the
activities of individual art historians, collectors and art market participants to provide an analytical and observational study of the development of Chinese furniture collecting and its accompanying literature. Analysis of the literary materials provides clarification and understanding of the development of the cultural history of classic Chinese furniture. To facilitate comparison with the social, visual and experiential perception of classic Chinese furniture as it was understood at the time of its production, the study will consider and cross-reference primary textual and visual evidence from the Ming and Qing dynasties with 20th Century and later literature on Chinese furniture. This overarching review of the historiography and sources relating to Chinese classic furniture may also shed light on widely held presumptions regarding the materials and presentation of classic Chinese furniture, including the importance and knowledge of particular wood types which have informed appreciation and collecting practices
Understanding young skilled migrants’ homeownership outcomes in Guangzhou: the role of employer types and settlement intentions
Get PDFIndustrial development and technological innovation depend heavily on knowledge-based activities. It is safe to say that skilled migrants play an essential role in economic growth, technological innovation, and progress that can drive cities’ sustainable and rapid development. Thus, how to attract and retain skilled migrants in the permanent labour market has become a key focus of China’s social policy agenda. Previous studies on migrant housing tenure choice and settlement intentions have mainly emphasized the role of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, migration characteristics, and institutional constraints in determining homeownership outcomes. However, the literature linking migrants’ employment types and homeownership outcomes, and how employment types interact with settlement intentions, has been surprisingly silent.
In order to take a step forward, this thesisuses a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative statistical analysis and qualitative interview methods, to disentangle the underlying mechanism of income levels and settlement intentions in shaping the relationship between employer types and homeownership outcomes.
There are fourkey findings from this thesis.Firstly, young skilled migrants working in the public sector are more likely to become homeowners in Guangzhou than those working in the private sector.Secondly, as income grows, the positive role of public sector jobs in shaping homeownership outcomes becomes less pronounced.Thirdly, long-term settlement intentions mediate the relationship between young skilled migrants’ employer types and homeownership outcomes. Fourthly, three key life domains of employment, settlement intentions, and homeownership outcomes are intricately and closely linked.
This thesis calls for policymakers to consider the interplay between employment, settlement, and housing rather than looking at them in isolation when considering future policies to encourage private-sector employment, increase settlement intentions, and promote homeownership
Gender and economy in medieval Milan: the autonomy of lay and religious women in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
Get PDFIn the last hundred years, scholarship has become increasingly aware of the importance of women in medieval history and has covered their lives from a variety of angles. Overall, it has emerged that women often lived in subordination to men and had limited economic and legal agency. However, studies from various parts of Western Europe have identified a large variation in the experience of women across different regions and different points in the medieval period. Depending on the legal system of an area, its economic welfare, and its cultural and religious situation, women could have important economic rights, a central place in family politics, and significant religious freedoms, or they could find themselves completely controlled by men, sidelined in their families, and forced to cloister against their will.
Despite the evidence for variation over time and space, many regions and time periods have not received enough attention. In the Italian peninsula, twelfth- and thirteenth-century Milan is the most notable gap. By the end of the thirteenth century, this city had become an economic powerhouse, a central point in international politics, and had experienced significant legal and governmental changes. However, the role of women in the city or how this changed in this turbulent period has not been discussed. This creates a blind spot in our understanding of medieval women, as we largely ignore how they lived in a fundamental city in Southern Europe.
This study aims to fill this gap by exploring the economic agency lay and religious women had. To do so, this study relies on almost 6,000 parchments from the Archivio di Stato di Milano, which detail the economic transactions and disputes of most Milanese religious institutions of the period. Through this large amount of economic data, this study quantifies how frequently lay women participated in the economy and with what legal and cultural limitations. It focuses on the way abbesses managed the economy of their nunneries compared to the management styles of abbots and other male leaders. It continues with a quantification of the wealth and size of nunneries and male religious institutions, finally finishing with a discussion on the participation of nuns in the economy.
This research shows that Milanese women, whether lay or religious, could participate less freely in the economy than men and generally had less wealth. However, abbesses had a great deal of control over the economies of their monasteries, which allowed them to play a large role in the Milanese economy. Among laywomen, widows could act with the greatest independence, but some exceptional examples exist of wives or unmarried women also acting with great freedom. This research therefore confirms that women had limited independence, especially when participating in the economy, but significant exceptions could exist. Furthermore, this research demonstrates the benefit of quantitatively analysing the surviving parchments of ecclesiastical institution to better understand the religious and lay life of a city in the twelfth and thirteenth century
Investigating gene expression patterns and amino acid metabolism in CML LSCs using transcriptomics and ex-vivo expansion
Get PDFChronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) is a myeloproliferative disease where a normal haematopoietic stem cell (HSC) undergoes chromosomal translocation, leading to the formation of the Philadelphia chromosome (Ph). The Ph contains the fusion oncogene breakpoint cluster region abelson murine Leukemia 1 (BCR::ABL1), which encodes a constitutively active tyrosine kinase. BCR::ABL1 signalling transforms a HSC into a leukaemic stem cell (LSC), which is responsible for propagating CML. Tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) have vastly improved patient outcomes in the long and short term, however BCR::ABL1 inhibition alone is insufficient to eradicate all disease causing LSCs.
Bulk transcriptome profiling is a method which has been used to study CML LSCs for over 20 years, and has revealed much regarding the phenotype and molecular features of the LSC. Recent advances such as single cell transcriptomics have again increased the granularity at which we understand LSCs, now providing the capacity to phenotypically identify BCR::ABL1+ LSCs, predict treatment responses, and identify features of treatment resistant LSCs. Metabolomics and transcriptomics have also shown that LSCs possess enhanced metabolism compared to their HSC counterparts, with metabolic adaption also being a mechanism by which LSCs are capable of surviving TKI treatment. Therefore, we aimed to conduct a metaanalysis on CML LSC transcriptomic datasets to determine if we could identify novel BCR::ABL1+ specific signals and metabolic genes across phenotypes, ranging from CD34+ to CD34+CD38-CD90+CD26+ cells. Additionally, we aimed to use recent advances in ex-vivo HSC culture and apply them to LSCs, to identify the metabolic weaknesses of murine CML LSCs, and validate these findings in-vivo.
In our meta-analysis, we show numerous uncharacterised genes differentially expressed in LSCs compared to bystander BCR::ABL1- or normal HSCs across datasets and phenotypes, and a core of commonly expressed genes that would likely represent meaningful therapeutic targets. We also observed widespread changes in all areas of metabolism, particularly OXPHOS, amino acid (AA) and fatty acid metabolism in Lin-CD34+CD38- LSCs. While we detected fewer changes within the Lin-CD34+CD38-CD90+ compartment, we were still able to detect metabolic changes, suggesting this weakness is present even in a highly primitive phenotype.
To assess the utility of ex-vivo culture methods, we conducted hibernation culture and poly-vinyl alcohol (PVA) based expansion culture on CML LSCs. We found that the low number of LSCs that could be purified from leukaemic mice made hibernation culture a challenge when considering hypothesis testing, even though it may be more physiologically relevant. Using PVA based ex-vivo expansion, we were capable of expanding LSCs from a c-kit enriched or sorted population under normoxia or hypoxia. We then used expanded LSCs to conduct an AA dropout screen, wherein LSCs were grown in media individually missing each of the AAs. Among the top hits were valine, leucine and isoleucine (the branched chain amino acids (BCAAs)), which we further characterised using a combination of expanded LSCs and cell lines. We found BCAA restriction in-vitro to be highly efficacious, with a 75% reduction in BCAA concentration having a strong anti-leukaemic effect in both cell lines and expanded cells. We also show that BCAA restriction reduced ex-vivo expanded HSC growth substantially. Lastly, we used dietary restriction of BCAAs to treat murine CML in-vivo, however, the combination of BCAA restriction and CML was poorly tolerated, and so we could not detect any anti-leukaemic effect
Topological insulator material for high frequency generation
No full textAbstract not currently available
Family language policy in the context of Saudi sojourner families in the UK: understanding the complex language ideologies and practices of bilingual speakers
No full textAbstract not currently available
Methods for navigating chemical space and AI-driven synthesis
No full textAbstract not currently available
Beyond fiction: why big techs need real corporate governance
No full textAbstract not currently available
Investigating MAPK activation thresholds in the immune decision to initiate inflammation
No full textAbstract not currently available
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