The Platformed Money Ecosystem: Digital Financial Platforms, Datafication, and Reimagining Financial Well-being

Digital financial platforms have become an integral part of consumers\u27 lives–resulting in the datafication of everyday life and potential for uniquely impacting financial well-being. Extending previous transformative consumer research, we suggest financial well-being must center the ways digital financial platforms and their resulting data are increasingly enmeshed with financial decision making and consumption. Drawing on a theoretical lens of platformization, we propose the Platformed Money Ecosystem, which accounts for increased embeddedness of digital financial platforms within consumers\u27 lives and the subtlety of how everyday life is transformed into data: producing data at the micro-level, monetizing data at the meso-level, and regulating data at the macro-level. In conceptualizing the Platformed Money Ecosystem, we identify three data-informed considerations for scholars and policymakers to reimagine financial well-being: protecting consumer data, limiting data biases, and supporting data literacy

Control of flowering time and spike development in cereals: the earliness per se Eps-1 region in wheat, rice, and Brachypodium

The earliness per se gene Eps-Am1 from diploid wheat Triticum monococcum affects heading time, spike development, and spikelet number. In this study, the Eps1 orthologous regions from rice, Aegilops tauschii, and Brachypodium distachyon were compared as part of current efforts to clone this gene. A single Brachypodium BAC clone spanned the Eps-Am1 region, but a gap was detected in the A. tauschii physical map. Sequencing of the Brachypodium and A. tauschii BAC clones revealed three genes shared by the three species, which showed higher identity between wheat and Brachypodium than between them and rice. However, most of the structural changes were detected in the wheat lineage. These included an inversion encompassing the wg241-VatpC region and the presence of six unique genes. In contrast, only one unique gene (and one pseudogene) was found in Brachypodium and none in rice. Three genes were present in both Brachypodium and wheat but were absent in rice. Two of these genes, Mot1 and FtsH4, were completely linked to the earliness per se phenotype in the T. monococcum high-density genetic map and are candidates for Eps-Am1. Both genes were expressed in apices and developing spikes, as expected for Eps-Am1 candidates. The predicted MOT1 protein showed amino acid differences between the parental T. monococcum lines, but its effect is difficult to predict. Future steps to clone the Eps-Am1 gene include the generation of mot1 and ftsh4 mutants and the completion of the T. monococcum physical map to test for the presence of additional candidate genes