Advocacy in Agricultural Social Movements: Exploring Facebook as a Public Relations Communication Tool

Public relations is the act of building and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships among organizations and people through the use of marketing and promoting strategies to build and maintain a successful public image. Currently, social media (including Facebook) are being adopted as a communication tool in public relations efforts to build relationships with different publics. Facebook is a popular social networking site that has the capability to offer a range of promotional tools and allows users to build relationships. The purpose of this study was to determine how administrators of Facebook groups are utilizing Facebook for promoting their agricultural advocacy campaigns. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with Facebook group administrators who actively contribute to the promotion of a cause by using the social networking site. Results indicated that administrators believe Facebook has been an effective form of communication and that people join their groups primarily to engage in conversations about agriculture and to build relationships with people who share similar interests. Overall, participants were pleased with the outcome of their Facebook groups and offered advice for future practitioners who want to use social media to promote agricultural social movements. The results of this study also led to the development of a model to illustrate how Facebook can be used to promote social movements in agriculture

Using Facebook as a Communication Tool in Agricultural-Related Social Movements

A social movement is a personal obligation taken on by an individual, due to either a personal experience or responsibility, to pursue action to implement a change in a community or society. Facebook is a social networking device in which users interact through conversations, and build relationships by networking with other users. Facebook groups are created as part of a smaller community within the social networking site and focus on particular interests or beliefs about certain issues. The purpose of this study was to determine why individuals use social media, specifically Facebook, to communicate information in social movements related to agricultural issues. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with Facebook group administrators who actively contribute to the promotion of an agricultural-related social movement. Results indicated that Facebook was a beneficial communication tool to help the social movements reach more individuals. The Facebook group administrators were motivated to become involved with the social movement due to personal experiences. Although Facebook is the primary method used to reach target audience members, the participants said they use a variety of other communication channels. Additional research should explore other social movements to determine the impact social media has on communication efforts

Post-transcriptional and post-translational regulations of drought and heat response in plants: a spider’s web of mechanisms

Drought and heat tolerance are complex quantitative traits. Moreover, the adaptive significance of some stress-related traits is more related to plant survival than to agronomic performance. A web of regulatory mechanisms fine-tunes the expression of stress-related traits and integrates both environmental and developmental signals. Both post-transcriptional and post-translational modifications contribute substantially to this network with a pivotal regulatory function of the transcriptional changes related to cellular and plant stress response. Alternative splicing and RNA-mediated silencing control the amount of specific transcripts, while ubiquitin and SUMO modify activity, sub-cellular localization and half-life of proteins. Interactions across these modification mechanisms ensure temporally and spatially appropriate patterns of downstream-gene expression. For key molecular components of these regulatory mechanisms, natural genetic diversity exists among genotypes with different behavior in terms of stress tolerance, with effects upon the expression of adaptive morphological and/or physiological target traits

miRVine: a microRNA expression atlas of grapevine based on small RNA sequencing

miRNAs are the most abundant class of small non-coding RNAs, and they are involved in post-transcriptional regulations, playing a crucial role in the refinement of genetic programming during plant development. Here we present a comprehensive picture of miRNA regulation in Vitis vinifera L. plant during its complete life cycle. Furthering our knowledge about the post-transcriptional regulation of plant development is fundamental to understand the biology of such an important crop

Correction: High throughput approaches reveal splicing of primary microRNA transcripts and tissue specific expression of mature microRNAs in Vitis vinifera

The version of this article published in BMC Genomics 2009, 10:558, contains data in Table 1 which are now known to be unreliable, and an illustration, in Figure 1, of unusual miRNA processing events predicted by these unreliable data. In this full-length correction, new data replace those found to be unreliable, leading to a more straightforward interpretation without altering the principle conclusions of the study. Table 1 and associated methods have been corrected, Figure 1 deleted, supplementary file 1 added, and modifications made to the sections "Deep sequencing of small RNAs from grapevine leaf tissue" and "Microarray analysis of miRNA expression". The editors and authors regret the inconvenience caused to readers by premature publication of the original paper

High throughput approaches reveal splicing of primary microRNA transcripts and tissue specific expression of mature microRNAs in Vitis vinifera

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>MicroRNAs are short (~21 base) single stranded RNAs that, in plants, are generally coded by specific genes and cleaved specifically from hairpin precursors. MicroRNAs are critical for the regulation of multiple developmental, stress related and other physiological processes in plants. The recent annotation of the genome of the grapevine (<it>Vitis vinifera </it>L.) allowed the identification of many putative conserved microRNA precursors, grouped into multiple gene families.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here we use oligonucleotide arrays to provide the first indication that many of these microRNAs show differential expression patterns between tissues and during the maturation of fruit in the grapevine. Furthermore we demonstrate that whole transcriptome sequencing and deep-sequencing of small RNA fractions can be used both to identify which microRNA precursors are expressed in different tissues and to estimate genomic coordinates and patterns of splicing and alternative splicing for many primary miRNA transcripts.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our results show that many microRNAs are differentially expressed in different tissues and during fruit maturation in the grapevine. Furthermore, the demonstration that whole transcriptome sequencing can be used to identify candidate splicing events and approximate primary microRNA transcript coordinates represents a significant step towards the large-scale elucidation of mechanisms regulating the expression of microRNAs at the transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels.</p

Support for UNRWA's survival

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) provides life-saving humanitarian aid for 5·4 million Palestine refugees now entering their eighth decade of statelessness and conflict. About a third of Palestine refugees still live in 58 recognised camps. UNRWA operates 702 schools and 144 health centres, some of which are affected by the ongoing humanitarian disasters in Syria and the Gaza Strip. It has dramatically reduced the prevalence of infectious diseases, mortality, and illiteracy. Its social services include rebuilding infrastructure and homes that have been destroyed by conflict and providing cash assistance and micro-finance loans for Palestinians whose rights are curtailed and who are denied the right of return to their homeland

Characterization of five microRNA families in maize.

In recent years, microRNAs (miRNAs) have polarized the interest of the scientific community as a new category of gene expression regulators, present in both plants and animals. Plant miRNAs are involved in processes such as plant development, organ identity, and stress response. Nonetheless, knowledge of their functions is still incomplete, and it is conceivable that further new processes in which they are involved will be discovered. For these reasons, structural and functional characterization of MIR genes, that are also in crop species such as Zea mays L., becomes instrumental in addressing genetic and molecular mechanisms controlling phenotype determination and phenotypic adaptation to growing conditions. The present study contributes to the characterization of five miRNA families in maize, from the determination of their expression pattern in different maize tissues and genotypes, to the identification of putative targets by bioinformatic means and subsequent experimental validation of three targets by modified 59 RACE experiments. Furthermore, 30 different MIR genes belonging to these five miRNA families were analysed by their attribution to maize chromosomes using oat\u2013 maize addition lines and by investigating their phylogenetic relationship with genes from other cereals. In particular, sequence homology was determined by the reciprocal best BLAST hit approach, to define groups of homologous genes between maize, rice, and sorghum