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The role and implications of RNAscope and mRNA in the diagnosis of tuberculosis
Get PDFFunding: The authors’ research on host biomarkers of TB diagnosis is supported by the Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support fund of the University of St Andrews, grant code 204821/Z/16/Z.Peer reviewe
From molecules to materials : Collaborative research at the chemistry—materials science interface and lessons learned in cyclophane chemistry
Get PDFIn the spirit of pursuing collaborative research at the interface of chemistry and materials science for engineering cyclophane-based functional systems, we share our journey from molecules to materials and accomplishments exploring technologically-relevant smallmolecule organic emitters, polymer thin films, and supra-sensing through supramolecular hostguest interactions (molecular self-assembly). This report highlights diverse research trajectories and the importance of active collaboration within the chemistry community. It is also intended to serves young scientists who are committed to research in these interdisciplinary domains. This inspires fostering global research networks and promoting industrial−academic symbiosis that bring innovations to the education environment and curriculum by sharing mutual experiences, knowledge, and specialised skills which may cut across several inter-related disciplines.Peer reviewe
Chirality reversal with the carrier-envelope phase : a next generation QTAIM interpretation
Get PDFFunding: The Hunan Natural Science Foundation of China project gratefully acknowledged approval number: 2022JJ30029. The One Hundred Talents Foundation of Hunan Province is also gratefully acknowledged for the support of S.J. and S.R.K. MJP thanks the EPSRC for funding through grants EP/T021675 and EP/V006746.Simulated circularly-polarized 10 femtosecond laser pulses that induce a mixture of excited states are applied to ethane. Additionally, the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) angle ϕ, that quantifies the relationship between the time-varying direction of electric (E)-field and the amplitude envelope was used to manipulate the mechanical and chiral properties of ethane using Next Generation Quantum Theory of Atoms in Molecules (NG-QTAIM). The chirality assignments were reversed from S to R as the CEP angle ϕ was increased from ϕ = 0.0° to ϕ = 180°. A one-to-one mapping between the CEP angle ϕ and NGQTAIM trajectories was discovered.Peer reviewe
Friend, fascist, foreigner : the interwar British-Florentines 1919-1940
No full textSince the earliest years of the Grand Tour, a thriving British expatriate community has rested in Florence’s Arno Valley. Historians have often declared, however, that the ‘end’ of this community occurred following the conclusion of the First World War. This thesis utilises under-represented primary sources to demonstrate that, on the contrary, the interwar British community of Florence was not only very much still active up to the Second World War, but very much contributed to the development of interwar Florence. This thesis corrects the historiographical absence of this community’s voice, illustrating this community’s daily life, characters, and culture, in the hope of promoting further studies of ‘marginalised’ communities whose effects upon mainstream narratives have, too often, been overlooked
Shared determinants of poor sleep and increased adiposity and obesity in childhood and adolescence
No full textIntroduction: Poor sleep and obesity in adolescents present significant public health challenges. Previous research has shown that sleep duration and obesity are bidirectionally associated in adolescents, however the relationship between different components of sleep and obesity, and their shared determinants, is unclear. This doctoral research investigates the relationship between sleep, obesity, and adiposity in adolescents, and identifies potential shared determinants of poor sleep and obesity.
Methodology: A mixed methods approach was used to investigate the aims of this research: (1) Systematic review - to examine the relationship between different sleep domains, obesity, and adiposity in 8-18-year-olds (SR1); and to identify shared determinants of poor sleep and obesity in 8-18-year-olds (SR2); (2) Secondary data analysis: Growing Up in Scotland dataset - to analyse the longitudinal relationships between sleep, obesity, and shared determinants across childhood and adolescence; (3) Primary cross sectional research: Teen Sleep Well Study - to identify shared determinants (components of screen time usage, diet choices and consumption behaviours, and physical activity) of poor sleep and adiposity in 11-14-year-olds.
Results: Pre-sleep outcomes and social jetlag were significantly associated with obesity in 8-18-year-olds. Sleep deteriorated between the ages of 8-14-years, and 50% of 11-14-year-olds experienced poor wellbeing and fluctuating or obesogenic growth trajectories. The shared determinants of poor sleep and obesity in adolescents include: (i) screen time: excessive late-night, early morning, and weekend use, videogaming addiction, lack of parental knowledge of child’s screen time; (ii) dietary choices and consumption behaviours: irregular meal timing, and late-night food consumption; (iii) physical activity: late-night moderate-to-vigorous physical activity; (iv) engaging in risk-taking behaviours: smoking and alcohol consumption.
Discussion: Many of the identified shared determinants of sleep and obesity act as zeitgebers that entrain the circadian rhythm of the adolescent and could be used as targets in a multi-component health-promoting intervention for adolescents (8-10-years-olds)
The interplay between social and environmental plasticity in the rapid adaptation of a Hawaiian field cricket (Teleogryllus oceanicus)
No full textThe role of phenotypic plasticity in genetic adaptation has been at the centre of a decades long debate. Recent research has revealed that the potential for plasticity-led adaptation is highly conditional, dependant on the intrinsic characteristics of a plastic response and the selection pressures acting on it. However, the fact that the potential for plasticity-led adaptation is susceptible to multiple environmental conditions, given that phenotypes are expressed in an interdependent ecological and social context, has been inadvertently neglected. In this thesis, I investigate the intricate relationship between social and environmental plasticity in the rapid adaptation of the Hawaiian Field Cricket (Teleogryllus oceanicus). Ancestrally reliant on acoustic signals for sexual advertising, selection from an acoustically orienting parasitoid fly (Ormia ochracea) has led to the emergence of a silent male morph (induced by the flatwing mutation). Adaptive behavioural adjustments in the new morph, coupled with permissive female choice, are thought to have accommodated the absence of an important sexual signal. Flatwing males show higher propensity to engage in phonotactic behaviour and socially-plastic locomotory activity, facilitating encounters with conspecifics. Here, I investigate how different components of the abiotic and social environments interact to shape the expression of traits that promote flatwing evolution at the behavioural and genetic level. Through dietary and social environment manipulation, Chapter 2 revealed that direct and indirect, genetic and environmental effects influenced female mating behaviour and male courtship. In Chapter 3, I identified the genetic substrate involved in socially-plastic adaptations in flatwing males. Chapter 4 showed that the outcome of social interactions between females was dependent on multiple social environment components, and Chapter 5 revealed that previously observed female preferences dissipate in a group context. These findings underscore the importance of considering multiple sources of plasticity and their interactions to fully grasp the evolutionary consequences of phenotypic plasticity
Configurationsintimate testimony in femal cross-border chroniclers
No full textFunding: This article is derived from a research project funded by the Georg Forster Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany during my postdoctoral stay at the Institute for Latin American Studies at the Free University of Berlin (2021 - 2022), as well as with support from the LLILAS Benson Fellowship of the University of Texas.This paper explores the formal relationships between the contemporary chronicle and other first-person documentary narratives, as well as the relationship between genre and gender. It proposes a re-reading of Gloria Anzaldúa as a transborder and transdiscursive author whose Borderlands/La Frontera could be the origin of a queer genealogy for a certain type of contemporary chronicle, one that is both female and feminist. In order to look at how this trend includes new configurations of Latin American subjectivities the paper focuses on a comparative analysis of Cristina Rivera Garza’s El invencible verano de Liliana and Gabriela Wiener’s Huaco retrato. The objective is to identify the literary and performative strategies that both authors use to offer a vision of female subjectivities in the process of becoming. The analyses are done by applying Rosi Braidotti’s and Adriana Cavarero’s feminist theories on subjectivity and emotions. It is argued that the figure of the “intimate chronicler” can be used to describe a new type of female narrator in testimonial-(auto)biographical-style narratives. It is concluded that the mentioned authors are able of incorporating other subjectivities and figurations of the feminine to the current debates on gender representation in Latin American literature and culture.Peer reviewe
Geochemical analysis of extremely fine-grained cryptotephra : new developments and recommended practices
Get PDFFunding: This work was funded by a NERC IAPETUS2 DTP studentship [NE/S007431/1] awarded to H. M. Innes and UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship [MR/S033505/1] awarded to W. Hutchison. A. Burke is supported by a Leverhulme Trust Prize [PLP-2021-167]. The St Andrews EPMA was supported by the EPSRC through grants EP/T019298/1, EP/L017008/1 and EP/R023751/1.Tephrochronology is a powerful tool used to synchronise and date stratigraphic records by accurate and precise geochemical analysis of deposited volcanic glass shards. However, in many distal stratigraphic records (e.g., polar ice cores) tephra shards are often extremely fine-grained (5 μm for electron probe microanalysis (EPMA) to ensure high analytical totals and minimise alkali element loss. Recent method developments have put forward alternative approaches to accurately measure major oxides of small shards: a smaller 3 μm diameter beam, overlapping large (20 μm) beam areas onto supporting epoxy resin, and using scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectrometry (SEM-EDS). However, there has been no direct intercomparison of these alternative techniques, which to date have only been tested on a limited range of glass compositions and tephras that are much larger than the extremely fine-grained material found in distal archives. These issues complicate decision making about the best analytical approach to take when faced with small shards. Here, we provide a new workflow protocol for the analysis of <10 μm tephra by determining the accuracy and precision of alternative SEM-EPMA methods. By analysing a variety of glass standards including those prepared to replicate fine-grained ice-core cryptotephras, we show that a 3 μm EPMA beam is suitable for use on all glass compositions provided the beam current is reduced to 1 nA. When glass areas are too small for a 3 μm beam we show that overlapping this small beam onto epoxy resin is preferable to SEM-EDS analysis. We also provide evidence confirming that using 3–0.2 μm polishes for <5 min increases analytical precision of the most abundant major oxides by up to three times, whilst, crucially, preserving the smallest shards in a sample. By directly applying these alternative methods to ice-core cryptotephra, we demonstrate the data are of suitable accuracy and precision to make robust geochemical correlations. This workflow can be applied to future tephrochronology studies, significantly increasing the quality and quantity of data that are obtained from cryptotephra horizons in distal records.Peer reviewe
Uniform, efficient and independent Ramsey taxes across markets
Get PDFIn a perfectly competitive market and in multi-product monopoly with linear demands and costs, the socially optimal taxes are Ramsey independent taxes (RIT), which are independent of each other, have a simple structure, reduce all products proportionally, and affect consumers and firms in similar ways. Under imperfect competition, while not optimal in general for both social welfare and consumer surplus objectives, RIT nevertheless retain attractive uniform effects in all markets. In asymmetric Cournot and Bertrand oligopolies, the socially and consumer-efficient taxes are surprisingly complex even in simple settings. Postulating a third objective of taxation as the average of social welfare and consumer surplus restores the optimality of RIT. Finally, another important property is that RIT impose equal corresponding marginal costs across all types of markets, as required for economy-wide efficient taxation.Peer reviewe
The EBLM Project– XI. Mass, radius, and effective temperature measurements for 23 M-dwarf companions to solar-type stars observed with CHEOPS
Get PDFFunding: ACC and TW acknowledge support from STFC consolidated grant numbers ST/R000824/1 and ST/V000861/1, and UKSA grant number ST/R003203/1. MIS and PFLM acknowledge support from STFC research grant numbers ST/M001040/1 and ST/T506175/1. This research is supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 803193/BEBOP), and by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (no. RPG-2018-418).Observations of low-mass stars have frequently shown a disagreement between observed stellar radii and radii predicted by theoretical stellar structure models. This ‘radius inflation’ problem could have an impact on both stellar and exoplanetary science. We present the final results of our observation programme with the CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) to obtain high-precision light curves of eclipsing binaries with low-mass stellar companions (EBLMs). Combined with the spectroscopic orbits of the solar-type companions, we can derive the masses, radii, and effective temperatures of 23 M-dwarf stars. We use the pycheops data analysis software to analyse their primary and secondary occultations. For all but one target, we also perform analyses with Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) light curves for comparison. We have assessed the impact of starspot-induced variation on our derived parameters and account for this in our radius and effective temperature uncertainties using simulated light curves. We observe trends in inflation with both metallicity and orbital separation. We also observe a strong trend in the difference between theoretical and observational effective temperatures with metallicity. There is no such trend with orbital separation. These results are not consistent with the idea that the observed inflation in stellar radius combines with lower effective temperature to preserve the luminosity predicted by low-mass stellar models. Our EBLM systems provide high-quality and homogeneous measurements that can be used in further studies of radius inflation.Peer reviewe
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