Organizations today are facing difficulties with gaining committed employees. As organizational success isdependent on employee commitment, researchers have in recent years implied that there is a relationship betweenorganizational culture and organizational commitment. Organizational culture is described as the shared values,norms, assumptions and beliefs of a group. Moreover, research has shown that commitment consists out of threecomponents, of which continuance commitment is described as employees need rather than willingness to staywith its employing organization. Although there are research concerning the two concepts in a profit-drivenorganizational context, there seem to be less research concerning non-profit organizations, such as universities.The purpose of this thesis is therefore to examine if there is a relationship between organizational culture and thecomponent continuance commitment in universities. This was done through a quantitative research approach, witha positivistic research philosophy. To collect empirical data, a self-completion questionnaire was designed anddistributed. The choice was made to limit the empirical context to three universities within the Swedish countrySkåne. These universities are Malmö University, Kristianstad University and Lund University. Further, the contextwas limited to employees at the faculties of business administration and economics.The results of this thesis indicate that no relationship between organizational culture and continuance commitmentexists among employees at the faculties of business administration and economics at the three universities.Nevertheless, the results indicate that half of the respondents recognized a lack of organizational culture, butbelieved in need for it to create employee commitment.

Cells can release lipid bilayer vesicles of endosomal and plasma membrane origin, which are known as exosomes or extracellular vesicles (EVs). EVs contain diverse shuttling lipids, RNA and transmembrane proteins, and play an important role in communicating between neighboring or distant cells. Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed malignancy, with over 2 million new cases in 2018, and is the leading cause of cancer mortality in women all over the world. Some observational studies have suggested that breast cancer is more likely to develop among women who have type 2 diabetes; the association is clear in postmenopausal women. Moreover, women with type 2 diabetes diagnosed before, at the same time, or after breast cancer diagnosis, have decreased overall survival compared to women without diabetes. The most recent medical studies provide more clues as to why breast cancer is more common and has poorer prognosis in type 2 diabetes patients, by pointing out the role of insulin-resistant adipocytes in the etiopathology. Here, we demonstrate how insulin-resistant adipocytes engage crosstalk with breast cancer cells through EVs in the microenvironment and drive the tumor cells to be more metastatic and aggressive. These progression mechanisms and the effects of insulin-resistant adipocytes on breast cancer cells require Bromodomain and ExtraTerminal (BET) proteins – an important epigenetic pathway. Targeting this pathway may help reduce morbidity and mortality of women with breast cancer and type 2 diabetes.

Diapause is often an adaptation for survival during periods of harsh environmental conditions. Some diapausing stages do not terminate the dormancy once the favourable conditions are restored. Such prolonged diapause may be enforced by environment if a diapausing stage cannot be reached by the cues inducing termination of dormancy. However, it may also be an advantageous bet-hedging strategy to allow only a fraction of dormant stages produced in any given season to hatch the next time conditions become favourable. I tested whether such strategy can be observed in hatching patterns of dormant eggs of Daphnia obtusa - a cladoceran occurring in small Central European temporary waters. I investigated the influence of intensity of illumination on hatching success, and effect of isolating the eggs encased in ephippia from the sediment. Fraction of eggs terminating diapause, fraction of embryos successfully leaving the egg membranes, and timing of the response were assessed at 15 ˚C under four intensities of illumination (100% = 35µmol.m2 .s-1 , 75%, 50%, 25%; photoperiod 12h light: 12h dark) and in complete darkness for 21 days. My results support previous suggestions that there is no genetically-fixed bet-hedging strategy in D. obtusa. I observed high proportion of eggs which terminated diapause in all...

By cross-linking B7-DC on dendritic cells (DC) the human IgM antibody (B7-DC XAb) shifts polarized immune responses from Th2 to Th1 in an antigen-specific manner. The molecular determinants governing the ability of DC to reprogram the polarity of T cell recall responses are not yet known. In addition to the expected role of T-bet expressed by T cells in regulating Th1 responses, we find using in vitro assays and an established in vivo model of allergic airway inflammation that T-bet expression by DC is also required for the polarity shift promoted by B7-DC XAb. T-bet expression by both T cells and DC is critically important for B7-DC XAb-induced down-regulation of IL-4, up-regulation of IFN-γ and suppression of allergic airway inflammation. Moreover, retroviral reconstitution of T-bet expression in T-bet-deficient DC rescued their ability to modulate both naive and memory T-cell responses from Th2 to Th1. Our observations further our understanding of the critical mediators controlling the ability of DC to modify the responses of previously activated T cells and reveal the interesting use of the same transcription factor to regulate the inductive phenotype of DC and the inducible phenotype of T cells.

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court overturned PASPA, a law which had previously deemed sports betting illegal. Following this ruling, states have already or have begun passing legislation which legalizes sport betting. As legalization continues to sweep the nation, an untapped domain of research has emerged. From a sport management perspective, there is a new, highly lucrative sport industry with which there is minimal research. The main purpose of this research project is to examine how bet presentation influences consumer behavior related to sports gambling. Specifically, the role that bet format presentation has on consumers’ willingness to bet and the amount they are willing to bet. Additionally, the potentially mediating effects of numeracy and team identification were examined. Participants (N=703) were recruited from the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, as these locations natively use different forms of bet presentation (American, fractional, and decimal). This study utilized a Latin square experimental design that examined whether participants were willing to bet more money when shown American odds first compared to fractional odds first. Further, evidence was provided demonstrating the positive mediating influence of team identification, and the influence of subjective numeracy. Practically, the results from this study can inform sports betting organizations, sports betting consumers, as well as government and industry regulators. Theoretically, knowledge is contributed to the domains of sport management, behavioral pricing, and appraisal theory literature. / Tourism and Sport

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The inevitable progression of advanced prostate cancer to castration resistance, and ultimately to lethal metastatic disease, depends on primary or acquired resistance to conventional androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) and accumulated resistance mechanisms to evade androgen receptor (AR) suppression. Whereas the canonical androgen/AR signaling axis maintains prostate cell growth, differentiation and survival, in prostate cancer cells, AR adaptations that arise in response to ADT are not singular, but diverse, and include gene amplification, mutation and even complete loss of receptor expression. Collectively, each of these AR adaptations contributes to a complex, heterogenous, ADT-resistant tumor that culminates in prostate tumor cells transitioning from epithelial to mesenchymal states (EMT) and the development of metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC). Here, we examined prostate cancer cell lines that model common CRPC subtypes, each with different AR composition, and focused on novel regulators of tumor progression, the Bromodomain and ExtraTerminal (BET – BRD2, BRD3 and BRD4) family of proteins, to test the hypothesis that each BET family member regulates EMT and underlying characteristics such as cell motility and invasiveness. We systematically manipulated the BET proteins and found that BRD4 regulates cell migration and invasion across all models of CRPC, regardless of aggressiveness and AR status, whereas BRD2 and BRD3 only regulate cell migration and invasion in less aggressive models that retain AR expression or signaling. We determined that BRD4’s contribution to this process occurs through the transcriptional regulation of AHNAK, SNAI1 and SNAI2, which are EMT genes linked to promotion of metastasis in a diverse set of cancers. Furthermore, treatment of CRPC cell lines with low doses of MZ1, a small-molecule, BRD4-selective degrader, inhibits EMT and metastatic potential. Overall, these results reveal a novel, BRD4-regulated EMT gene signature that may be targetable to treat metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.

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