<p>Stress responsive genes play a key role in shaping the manner in which plants process and respond to environmental stress. Their gene products are linked to DNA transcription and its consequent translation into a response product. However, whilst these genes play a significant role in manufacturing responses to stressful stimuli, transcription factors coordinate access to these genes, specifically by accessing a gene&rsquo / s promoter region which houses transcription factor binding sites. Here transcriptional elements play a key role in mediating responses to environmental stress where each transcription factor binding site may constitute a potential response to a stress signal. Arabidopsis thaliana, a model organism, can be used to identify the mechanism of how transcription factors shape a plant&rsquo / s survival in a stressful environment. Whilst there are numerous plant stress research groups, globally there is a shortage of publicly available stress responsive gene databases. In addition a number of previous databases such as the Generation Challenge Programme&rsquo / s comparative plant stressresponsive gene catalogue, Stresslink and DRASTIC have become defunct whilst others have stagnated. There is currently a single Arabidopsis thaliana stress response database called STIFDB which was launched in 2008 and only covers abiotic stresses as handled by major abiotic stress responsive transcription factor families. Its data was sourced from microarray expression databases, contains numerous omissions as well as numerous erroneous entries and has not been updated since its inception.The Dragon Arabidopsis Stress Transcription Factor database (DASTF) was developed in response to the current lack of stress response gene resources. A total of 2333 entries were downloaded from SWISSPROT, manually curated and imported into DASTF. The entries represent 424 transcription factor families. Each entry has a corresponding SWISSPROT, ENTREZ GENBANK and TAIR accession number. The 5&rsquo / untranslated regions (UTR) of 417 families were scanned against TRANSFAC&rsquo / s binding site catalogue to identify binding sites. The relational database consists of two tables, namely a transcription factor table and a transcription factor family table called DASTF_TF and TF_Family respectively. Using a two-tier client-server architecture, a webserver was built with PHP, APACHE and MYSQL and the data was loaded into these tables with a PYTHON script. The DASTF database contains 60 entries which correspond to biotic stress and 167 correspond to abiotic stress while 2106 respond to biotic and/or abiotic stress. Users can search the database using text, family, chromosome and stress type search options. Online tools have been integrated into the DASTF&nbsp / database, such as HMMER, CLUSTALW, BLAST and HYDROCALCULATOR. User&rsquo / s can upload sequences to identify which transcription factor family their sequences belong to by using HMMER. The website can be accessed at http://apps.sanbi.ac.za/dastf/ and two updates per year are envisaged.</p>

Made available in DSpace on 2010-04-20T20:08:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 71050100644.pdf: 2460084 bytes, checksum: 241365dd3cddc6269db968680fafb88a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-03-04T00:00:00Z / Há uma crescente preocupação em relação à temática dos resíduos sólidos entre acadêmicos, governos, empresas e indivíduos, embora pouco se conheça sobre os motivos que direcionam as escolhas pessoais no descarte de itens recicláveis dentro do domicílio. As pessoas participam ou não de programas de coleta seletiva por motivos que não são aparentes e nem diretamente identificados. Assim, o problema desta tese foi: Que determinantes influenciam o comportamento para reciclagem? Quais implicações disso para formulação de políticas públicas direcionadas ao comportamento para reciclagem? Em torno desta questão, o objetivo foi entender o quanto os modelos cognitivo-comportamentais predizem e explicam o comportamento para reciclagem (CR), buscando examinar a relação cognição-comportamento proposta pela sua fundamentação teórica. Nesta Tese parte-se da premissa de que existe uma lacuna entre a pose de uma atitude pró-ambiental e a demonstração do comportamento, o que tem sido conhecido como hiato atitude-comportamento. Para isso, optou-se pela análise comparativa do poder preditivo de modelos de escolha racional (Teoria do Comportamento Planejado e Teoria do Comportamento Interpessoal) e do Modelo Atitude-Comportamento-Contexto. Considerou-se uma amostra não probabilística (N=400) de responsáveis por domicílios paulistanos que constavam na lista de assinantes de telefones fixos da Telefônica. Posteriormente os dados coletados foram submetidos à Modelagem de Equações Estruturais. Os resultados empíricos comprovaram a premissa que fundamenta esta Tese, mostrando efeito nulo da variável atitude na predição do comportamento para reciclagem. Os dados também revelaram que a melhor preditora de comportamento para reciclagem foi o hábito, seguido das influências sociais de grupos primários, controle percebido e da conveniência da coleta seletiva. Emergem daí a importância dos determinantes externos (contexto) como característica-chave para intervenções em políticas públicas direcionadas às mudanças comportamentais, conforme pressupostos do modelo ABC. / There is a growing concern about the issue of solid waste among academics, governments, companies and individuals, but little is known about the motives that drive personal choices in the disposal of recyclable items in a house. People participate or not programs of selective collection for reasons that are not apparent and not directly identified. Thus, the problem of this thesis was: what determinants influence that behavior for recycling? What are its implications for the formulation of public policies directed to the behavior for recycling? Concerning this issue, the goal was to understand how cognitive-behavioral models predict and explain the behavior for recycling, seeking to examine the relation cognition-behavior proposed in the theoretical basis. For this, the researcher opted for the comparative analysis of the predictive power of rational choice model (Theory of Planned Behavior and Theory of Interpersonal Behavior) and the Attitude, Behavior, Context model. It was used with a random sample (N = 400) of households situated in the city of São Paulo, taken from the list of subscribers of telephones (Telefônica). Subsequently, the collected data were submitted to the Structural Equation Modeling. The empirical results showed no effect of the variable attitude, reveling that the best predictor of behavior for recycling was the habit, followed by perceived control, social influences of primary groups and the selective collection convenience. Hence the emerging importance of the external determinants (context) as a key feature for interventions in public policies directed to behavioral changes, as assumptions of the ABC model.

Die &amp;quot;Kontextsensitivität&amp;quot; genannte systematische Berücksichtigung von Umweltinformationen durch Anwendungssysteme kann als Querschnittsfunktion im betrieblichen Umfeld in vielen Bereichen einen Nutzen stiften. Wirklich praxistaugliche kontextsensitive Anwendungssysteme, die sich analog zu einem mitdenkenden menschlichen Assistenten harmonisch in die ablaufenden Vorgänge in der Realwelt einbringen, haben einen enormen Bedarf nach umfassenden, d.h. diverse Aspekte der Realwelt beschreibenden Kontextinformationen, die jedoch prinzipbedingt verteilt in verschiedenen Datenquellen, etwa Kontexterfassungssystemen, Endgeräten sowie prinzipiell auch in beliebigen anderen, z.T. bereits existierenden Anwendungen entstehen. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist die Verringerung der Komplexität des Beschaffungsvorganges von verteilten und heterogenen Kontextinformationen durch Bereitstellung einer einfach verwendbaren Methode zur Darstellung eines umfassenden, aus verteilten und heterogenen Datenquellen zusammengetragenen Kontextmodells. Im Besonderen werden durch diese Arbeit zwei Probleme addressiert, zum einen daß ein Konsument von umfassenden Kontextinformationen mehrere Datenquellen sowohl kennen und zugreifen können und zum anderen über die zwischen den einzelnen Kontextinformationen in verschiedenen Datenquellen existierenden, zunächst nicht modellierten semantischen Verbindungen Bescheid wissen muß. Das dazu entwickelte Kontextinformationsintegrations- und -darstellungsverfahren kombiniert daher ein die Beschaffung und Integration von Kontextinformationen aus diversen Datenquellen modellierendes Informationsintegrationsmodell mit einem Kontextdarstellungsmodell, welches die abzubildende Realweltdomäne basierend auf ontologischen Informationen durch in problemspezifischer Weise erweiterte Verfahren des Semantic Web in einer möglichst intuitiven, wiederverwendbaren und modularen Weise modelliert. Nach einer fundierten Anforderungsanalyse des entwickelten Prinzips wird dessen Verwendung und Nutzen basierend auf der Skizzierung der wichtigsten allgemeinen Verwendungsmöglichkeiten von Kontextinformationen im betrieblichen Umfeld anhand eines komplexen betrieblichen Anwendungsszenarios demonstriert. Dieses beinhaltet ein Nutzerprofil, das von diversen Anwendungen, u.a. einem kontextsensitiven KFZ-Navigationssystem, einer Restaurantsuchanwendung sowie einem Touristenführer verwendet wird. Probleme hinsichtlich des Datenschutzes, der Integration in existierende Umgebungen und Abläufe sowie der Skalierbarkeit und Leistungsfähigkeit des Verfahrens werden ebenfalls diskutiert. / Context-awareness, which is the systematic consideration of information from the environment of applications, can provide significant benefits in the area of business and technology. To be really useful, i.e. harmonically support real-world processes as human assistants do it, practical applications need a comprehensive and detailed contextual information base that describes all relevant aspects of the real world. As a matter of principle, comprehensive contextual information arises in many places and data sources, e.g. in context-aware infrastructures as well as in &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; applications, which may have knowledge about the context based on their functionality to support a certain process in the real world. This thesis facilitates the use of contextual information by reducing the complexity of the procurement process of distributed and heterogenous contextual information. Particularly, it addresses the two problems that a consumer of comprehensive contextual information needs to be aware of and able to access several different data sources and must know how to combine the contextual information taken from different and isolated data sources into a meaningful representation of the context. Especially the latter information cannot be modelled using the current state of the art. These problems are addressed by the development of an integration and representation model for contextual information that allows to compose comprehensive context models using information inside distributed and heterogeneous data sources. This model combines an information integration model for distributed and heterogenous information (which consists of an access model for heterogeneous data sources, an integration model and an information relation model) with a representation model for context that formalizes the representation of the respective real world domain, i.e. of the real world objects and their semantic relations in an intuitive, reusable and modular way based on ontologies. The resulting model consists of five layers that represent different aspects of the information integration solution. The achievement of the objectives is rated based on a requirement analysis of the problem domain. The technical feasibility and usefulness of the model is demonstrated by the implementation of an engine to support the approach as well as a complex application scenario consisting of a user profile that integrates information from several data sources and a couple of context-aware applications, e.g. a context-aware navigation system, a restaurant finder application as well as an enhanced tourist guide that use the user profile. Problems regarding security and social effects, the integration of this solution into existing environments and infrastructures as well as technical issues like the scalability and performance of this model are discussed too.