The education for teachers involves an aspect regarding values in practice, which also contains a dimension of non-discrimination. Meanwhile, research shows problems regarding discrimination on the universities in Sweden, for instance in Bayatis dissertation about exclusion of racified students reveal. The purpose of this study is, through discourse analysis of selected quotes from the course literature at Södertörn’s education of teachers in after-school activities using the key-terms ”immigrant”, ”Swedish” and ”culture”, review the underlining values and norms that are being transferred to the students. The conclusions in this study supports existing research on the matter that problems exist in regards to exclusion of students at the universities in relation to implicit conceptions about race, varying and excluding definitions of the social category, ”Swedish” and that these aspects put together creates a written creation of ”the other” and leads to a slim image of the expected receiver of the literature. More research needs to be conducted to examine how it is on other universities in Sweden and how the students there perceive these events.

The purpose of this study is to examine the extent of which culture influences the food consumption process. More specifically, our research will focus on the consumption process of Swedish consumers, as well as their motivations when buying food products. The overall objective of our research is to analyse the extent of applicability the Swedish model of consumption might possibly have in a country like France with a strong food culture. To conduct our research, a qualitative method was used along with an interpretivist approach. This was in accordance with the overall aim to highlight social and cultural facts by analysing consumer behaviour. Based on the theoretical framework studied in the report, ten in-depth interviews were conducted on Swedish and French students. The findings include good insights and advice that retailers and suppliers in the food industry could use to improve the grocery shopping experience and make it a better fit to the consumers’ expectations. Some limitations could be observed in our research, mainly due to the language barrier, concerning both the research material and the interviews. The results were also influenced by the location of the study and the past experience of the respondents. Further research can be recommended to investigate the effect of food and culture on larger cities and in different locations. Doing so, the findings could give a more representative overview of the food consumption process. The study could also be expanded on different market niches with different age groups allowing comparisons from different generations. Another idea would be to target consumers with varying levels of incomes, in order to see to what extent income influences the food consumption process.

This study combines an investigation of the ecology of the saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica) and the epidemiology of diseases shared by saigas and domestic livestock. Ecological data from 2 saiga populations were collected and analysed, including a comparison of 3 ageing techniques for saigas. A serological survey of 1,151 saigas and 958 domestic livestock (cattle, sheep and goats) was carried out. Official data and fann surveys provided information on policy and practice in disease control, showing that both veterinary provision and livestock numbers have collapsed since independence. Seroprevalence to brucellosis among saigas was 3.8% in the Betpak-dala population and zero in the Ustiurt population. No serological evidence of infection with foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), bluetongue, epizootic haemorrhagic disease (EHD), peste-des-petitesruminants (PPR) or rinderpest was found among saigas. A recently-developed enzymelinked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was used to differentiate vaccine-induced antibodies to those caused by infection with FMD virus (FMDV). Serological evidence of infection with FMDV was found only in cattle (2.9%). Vaccine-induced antibodies to FMDV were found among 29.0% of cattle, 13.8% of sheep and 5.8% of goats, reflecting speciesdependent vaccination. Seroprevalence to brucellosis was 5.4% among cattle, 1.3% among sheep and 0.7% among goats. Of diseases not previously recorded in Kazakhstan, seroprevalence to bluetongue among livestock averaged 23.2%, EHD and PPR were found at low levels, and rinderpest was not found. Modelling of FMD and bluetongue sero-status found significant farm-level clustering. For FMD this may reflect the behaviour of individual owners, but as bluetongue is unrecognised, it may reflect small-scale differences in exposure to the vector. A model framework was developed for FMD dynamics in saigas, including a seasonally dependent transmission coefficient (P). This produced a pattern of FMD outbreaks similar to that seen in Kazakhstan in the 1950s and 1960s, with large epidemics in spring, dying out in the summer or autumn. The results suggest that FMD is not endemic in saiga, and that the saiga population is not a reservoir of infection for domestic livestock. However, saigas may constitute a reservoir of infection for brucellosis if full control of this disease in domestic livestock were attempted. Recommendations are made for disease control and saiga conservation in the light of these findings.

Flowering Locus T (FT ) plays a pivotal role in floral induction. It integrates the inputs from a complex network of flowering signalling pathways. Flowering is an efficiently orchestrated event that occurs in a plant at a particular time to ensure maximum reproductive success. It has been suggested that the FT protein is a long- distance mobile floral stimulus. In this report studies with a mutant version of FT (mFT) which had the start codon replaced with a stop codon to generate a non-translatable FT indicated that the mRNA was also capable of long distance movement although its physiological function as a floral stimulus was inhibited. Gene function study of FT and FT orthologues on brassica, tobacco, tomato and potato using the plant virus expression vector Potato Virus X (PVX) generated some interesting findings. In Short day Maryland Mammoth tobacco plants the overexpression of the Arabidopsis FT under non-inductive Long day condition induced early flowering while the mFT and mock control remained in the vegetative stage. In short day potato, it did not seem to have an effect on tuberization as only one from five of the inoculated plants tuberized. In brassica (broccoli) the effect on flowering time was inhibited due to Virus-induced Gene Silencing (VIGS) but the tomato FT (SP6A) had an effect on flowering time. In tomato, the overexpression of the Arabidopsis FT and FT- orthologues from tomato induced early flowering but the difference in flowering time in comparison to the controls was only a few days. Phenotypical and morphological changes such as seed production and lateral side shoot development were caused by expression of the target genes. The exact mechanism of action of these genes in the control of seed production and lateral side shoot development is unclear.

This thesis examined the prevalence and risk factors for lameness, limb lesions and claw lesions in pigs, and the influence of gilt nutrition on indicators of limb health through a cross-sectional survey and two cohort studies. A cross-sectional survey of 68 integrated pig farms in Ireland on lameness, limb and claw lesions of 2948 piglets, 3368 weaners, 544 lactating sows, 1289 finishers, 525 replacement gilts, 518 pregnant gilts and 604 pregnant sows was conducted. The prevalence of foot lesions, limb lesions and lameness was determined for each appropriate group and data relating to environmental and management parameters were also collected to identify risk factors. There was a high prevalence of lameness in finishers, gilts and sows. Lameness prevalence is higher in group gestation housing systems than in gestation stalls. Slat void width and the frequency of pen washing increased the risk of lameness in finisher pigs. Floor type, particularly the floor material used influenced both limb and foot lesions. Two cohort studies were conducted to investigate the effect of three dietary regimes for replacement gilts on lameness, areal bone mineral density (aBMD), behaviour, limb, claw and joint lesions and carcass traits. In the first, a diet specifically formulated for developing gilts and fed restrictively from 70kg until 2 weeks before the gilts approximate weight at first service, reduced lameness, joint lesion prevalence and claw unevenness when compared to the two most commonly practiced feeding regimes for developing gilts. In the second, a diet specifically formulated for developing gilts fed ad-libitum from 65 kg reduced lameness and increased aBMD when compared to the two most commonly practiced feeding regimes for developing gilts. In conclusion, this study provides valuable information on lameness, foot and limb lesion prevalence and risk factors as well as providing information on nutritional strategies that could help to address the current high levels of lameness in replacement gilts.

Crop protection products (CPPs) are an essential component of modern agriculture, necessary to improve crop yield to feed the ever-increasing world population. Regulation and safety testing of CPPs entering the environment is mandatory to ensure that their use is not at the detriment of environmental or human health. Regulatory laboratory studies typically over-estimate the persistence of CPPs within the environment as they are not representative of environmental conditions. This study investigated the role of non-UV light on CPP degradation and the development of soil surface communities. The inclusion of non-UV light in laboratory studies impacted the degradation of fludioxonil and cinosulfuron, increasing and decreasing the rate of transformation relative to dark conditions, respectively. Further, the inclusion of light increased non-extractable residues (NER) formation in fludioxonil, paclobutrazol and benzovindiflupyr. In a field based degradation experiment, the availability of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) increased the transformation of benzovindiflupyr relative to when PAR was restricted. Further, the formation of paclobutrazol and benzovindiflupyr NERs was increased when PAR was not restricted, and the proportion of CPP remaining at the soil surface (0-5 mm) was higher when PAR was restricted. Targeted amplicon sequencing (Illumina MiSeq) revealed that bacterial and phototrophic communities at the soil surface changed with time, and that communities formed when PAR was available were structurally distinct relative to communities when PAR was restricted. In a further experiment, analysis of bacterial and phototrophic communities under crops with differing canopy characteristics showed that distinct communities formed at the soil surface relative to bulk soil, and that phototrophic communities of bare soil and under low-density canopies were structurally distinct to those that formed under high-density canopies. This work has potential implications for regulatory CPP degradation studies, and furthers the understanding of soil surface community development in temperate environments.

There has been an increasing emphasis placed on understanding microbial c, in order to enable the patterns and processes governing the spatial distribution of soil microbiota to be determined. Due to current food security issues, this is particularly important within agricultural systems given the fundamental role microorganisms play in the maintenance of crop health and productivity. With evidence in favour of both ubiquity and endemism, complicated by systems, scales and communities, there is a need to address the question of microbial biogeography within a single system. A range of field experimental resources were used to investigate factors controlling the assembly of soil microbial communities. Microorganisms across all three domains of life demonstrated spatial scaling, in which there was no single universal driver. Land-use management was an important driver of eukaryote distribution, but also impacted the drivers of bacterial and eukaryote taxa groups under land-use practice. When considering microbial community structure, a pan microbial relationship between abundance and distribution was shown for the first time, across all microbial groups. Furthermore, partitioning microbial communities into common and rare groups provided information on the processes operating on the community and highlighted the importance of land-use management for shaping the structure of communities. Finally, a case study on plasmodiophorids increased current estimates of plasmodiophorid diversity in the soil. Also different communities were associated with the rhizosphere compared with the bulk soil, under different hosts. Plant development stage was also an important consideration acting on this previously understudied but highly significant group of protists to crop health.

No description available.

This study investigates the continuity and discontinuity of Persian traditional mural decoration and art, focusesing on the Qajarid period. The study intends to establish that cultural sources and forces such as religion, language and the socio-political environment have had an impact on the development and continuity in Persian mural decoration and art. Continuity and discontinuity of Persian art were parallel with the continuity and discontinuity of Persian cultural forces the rise and decline of art was closely associated with the development of national culture. Persian artistic traditions can be shown in continuity over three millennia was influenced by external sources, without radical change of direction. Continuity can be observed until the seventeenth century, to a peak of achievement as remarkable as the art of the Safavids. Three main epochs may be seen in Persian culture; the pre-Islamic. Islamic and contemporary epochs. National culture and art was formed and evolved in antiquity, and then continued and was enriched by the assimilation of Islamic beliefs during the next epoch and it finally merged with international styles very slowly during the post- Safavid epoch due to the strong impact of western culture and art, finally changing definitively during the Qajarid period. The assimilation of Persian art with European art led to the sudden decline of Persian art as a self-contained, self- dependent style.

With the estimated increase in global demand for food and over-reliance on staple food crops, the exploitation of agricultural biodiversity is important to address food security challenges. The aim of this study is to develop approaches to transfer major informational and physical resources developed in model plant and major crop species to resources poor crop species, using oil palm and Bambara groundnut as two exemplar crops. XSpecies (cross-species) approach, the core approach of the study, is described as the approach which uses microarrays developed for a given species to analyse another related species. The use of the XSpecies approach (here the cross-hybridisation of DNA from oil palm onto heterologous Affymetrix microarrays for Arabidopsis and rice), is the first experiment reported in oil palm and focused on a bulked segregant analysis of different shell-thicknesses for oil palm fruit. Primers design involved screening candidate probe-pairs filtered using PIGEONS software against oil palm transcriptome sequences generated using 454 sequencing technology. The results provided an insight into the effects of sequence divergence between oil palm and the reference species (Arabidopsis and rice) onto the power of detecting single feature polymorphism (SFPs) in oil palm, implying the importance of close association between studied and model plant/crop in XSpecies approach. The XSpecies approach coupled with genetical genomics was also tested within legumes, with Bambara groundnut as the query species compared to soybean as the resource rich species (20 Mya). A mild drought experiment, conducted in a controlled environment glasshouse, used an F5 segregating population derived from a controlled cross between DipC and Tiga Nicuru in Bambara groundnut. The cross-hybridisation of Bambara groundnut leaf RNA to the soybean GeneChip individual oligonucleotide probes resulted in a total of 1,531 of good quality gene expression markers (GEMs) on the basis of the differences in the hybridisation signal strength. The first ‘expression-based’ genetic map (GEM map) was constructed using 165 GEMs spanning 920.3 cM of Bambara groundnut genome. The first high density DNA-marker genetic map of 1,341.3 cM combining dominant DArT and co-dominant SNPs, developed using the DArT Seq approach, with additional pre-existing microarray-based DArT and SSR markers, was also developed in the F3 segregating population. Both maps were combined to form the first integrated map of 1,250.7 cM with 212 markers. Morphological differences and the rapid reduction in stomatal conductance observed within the F5 segregating population in the drought experiment provided trait data for a QTL analysis. The comprehensive QTL analysis in Bambara groundnut detected significant QTLs for morphological traits using GEM map, including internode length, peduncle length, pod number per plant, pod weight per plant, seed number per plant, seed weight per plant, 100-seed weight, shoot dry weight and harvest index across four linkage groups: LG1, LG2B, LG8B and LG11A. The loci controlling internode length and peduncle length were also consistently mapped to single marker on LG1 in DArTseq map using F3 segregating population, suggesting that these two traits are probably controlled by single gene or two closely linked genes. Despite significant genotypes effects on stomatal conductance tested in ANOVA analysis, no major QTLs were detected, suggesting the contributions of a number of small genetic effects to stomatal conductance. A preliminary homology search using the LG1 linkage group markers and associated gene models showed the ability to develop a framework for identification of candidate genes in Bambara groundnut relative to soybean. The present study also developed the resources for an eQTL analysis in a cross-species context. Translation from major and model plant species to underutilised and resource poor crops is critical to be able to develop many crop species with potential for future agriculture. This study examines some of the approaches which might be adopted and replicated in various underutilised crop species.