Sustainable procurement strategies for competitive advantage: An empirical study

Procurement plays a key role in sustainability as policies and practices need to extend beyond organisations' boundaries to incorporate their whole supply chains. There is, however, a paucity of empirical research on sustainable forms of procurement initiatives currently being implemented in the UK construction sector to improve competitiveness - which is the core driver of this paper. In order to achieve this aim, a mixed research methodological approach was adopted to collect and analyse data. The findings are based primarily on quantitative data obtained from 53 completed postal questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with 17 professionals from 12 UK construction organisations. As revealed by this study, sustainable procurement is becoming increasingly important in the UK construction sector. The paper concludes that the process of integrating sustainable procurement initiatives into existing business models is often a complex issue. Therefore, there is an urgent need to explore the drivers and impediments associated with the successful integration of sustainable procurement initiatives into existing construction business models. It is also suggested that there is a need for cross-sector collaboration to capture and share best and worst practices relating to sustainable procurement strategies

The FANCM:p.Arg658* truncating variant is associated with risk of triple-negative breast cancer

Abstract: Breast cancer is a common disease partially caused by genetic risk factors. Germline pathogenic variants in DNA repair genes BRCA1, BRCA2, PALB2, ATM, and CHEK2 are associated with breast cancer risk. FANCM, which encodes for a DNA translocase, has been proposed as a breast cancer predisposition gene, with greater effects for the ER-negative and triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) subtypes. We tested the three recurrent protein-truncating variants FANCM:p.Arg658*, p.Gln1701*, and p.Arg1931* for association with breast cancer risk in 67,112 cases, 53,766 controls, and 26,662 carriers of pathogenic variants of BRCA1 or BRCA2. These three variants were also studied functionally by measuring survival and chromosome fragility in FANCM−/− patient-derived immortalized fibroblasts treated with diepoxybutane or olaparib. We observed that FANCM:p.Arg658* was associated with increased risk of ER-negative disease and TNBC (OR = 2.44, P = 0.034 and OR = 3.79; P = 0.009, respectively). In a country-restricted analysis, we confirmed the associations detected for FANCM:p.Arg658* and found that also FANCM:p.Arg1931* was associated with ER-negative breast cancer risk (OR = 1.96; P = 0.006). The functional results indicated that all three variants were deleterious affecting cell survival and chromosome stability with FANCM:p.Arg658* causing more severe phenotypes. In conclusion, we confirmed that the two rare FANCM deleterious variants p.Arg658* and p.Arg1931* are risk factors for ER-negative and TNBC subtypes. Overall our data suggest that the effect of truncating variants on breast cancer risk may depend on their position in the gene. Cell sensitivity to olaparib exposure, identifies a possible therapeutic option to treat FANCM-associated tumors

Reactive Ion Plating. A Novel Deposition Technique For Improved Optical Coatings

Reactive Ion Plating Deposition (RIPD) is a plasma-enhanced thermal evaporation (physical vapor deposition, PVD) technique. A high current (50-60 A), low voltage (50 - 80 V) arc produced in a hot filament argon plasma source is burning into the crucible of a modified electron beam evaporator. The arc discharge ionizes the residual gas atmosphere in the coating chamber (O2 at about 10-4 to 10-3 mbar) as well as some of the evaporant. This creates an intense plasma in contact with the substrates. The substrates (dielectric optical elements) are mounted on an insulated holder (rotary dome). Because of receiving more electrons out of the plasma than ions, they obtain a negative self-bias of 5 to 50 V. This bias attracts and accelerates the positive ions out of the plasma (oxygen and evaporant species). The electrostatic nature of the attraction causes the accelerated ions impinge normal onto the surface of the substrate and the growing film. The resulting films are very dense, smooth, hard, and adherent to the substrate. They have also higher refractive index and laser-induced damage threshold than comparable oxide films deposited by standard electron beam evaporation. Here we report recent results obtained with single layer TiO2 and multilayer TiO2/SiO2, ZrO2/SiO2, and Ta2O5 coatings, which illustrate the improvements achieved with RIPD

James Franklin Collins correspondence.

Senders Fa-Fe (1866-1919