Thinking Like Entrepreneurs: Qlegal’s Experience of Teaching Law Students to have an Entrepreneurial Mindset

To advise a client you need to understand what they do. To provide truly innovative, client-centred advice, you also need to understand how they think. These observations are especially true when working with entrepreneurs who may be otherwise inclined to move forward with their business with or without legal guidance. Entrepreneurs are distinguished by their growth mindset and resilience, appetite for innovation and comfort with taking risks and doing things themselves. As the legal marketplace in the UK becomes increasingly competitive (due to legal technology and the growing number of alternative legal service providers), law students need to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset themselves, both to navigate the legal marketplacefor their own careers and to provide commercially aware legal services to their clients. Law schools need to teach law students to think like entrepreneurs, and commercial law clinics provide the natural setting. This paper adopts a qualitative case study approach to examine how qLegal, the pro bono commercial law clinic within the Centre for Commercial Law Studies (“CCLS”) at Queen Mary, University of London (“QMUL”) teaches students to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. We reflect on the importance of students learning about and developing this mindset, for their own professional development and to service the unmet legal needs of the start-up community. This paper will also highlight the challenges faced by qLegal staff, including our own legal training and experience, our obligations to real clients and our students’ expectations. We conclude by sharing examples of how we are currently teaching our students to have an entrepreneurial mindset and our ideas for overcoming our institutional challenges and improving our offering even more

Religious Relationships with the Environment in a Tibetan Rural Community : Interactions and Contrasts with Popular Notions of Indigenous Environmentalism

Acknowledgments: We thank Beijing Forestry University, our field assistants Tashi Rabden, Pema Dechin, Tsewang Chomtso and Gele Chopel for their invaluable help, the Forest Bureau of Daocheng county for permission and support, and the people of Samdo for their hospitality and participation. The research was funded by the ESRC and the World Pheasant Association. This paper is a contribution to Imperial College’s Grand Challenges in Ecosystems and the Environment initiative. Two anonymous reviewers gave valuable comments on the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Dwarf Crop Response to a 16 or 24 hr Photoperiod Under Low-Light Conditions

Plants were grown in ambient lab conditions under cool white fluorescent lights at a PPF of 90 µmol m-2 s-1 and a photoperiod of either 16 or 24 hours. Plants were watered with tap water once each day. Nutrients were supplied by Osmocote Plus slow-release fertilizer mixed into the media at approximately 7 g per 2 L pot.Rice, and soybeans become excessively elongated and could not practically be grown at this low light level. Tomatoes, peppers and peas were successfully grown. The life cycle for peas and peppers was two to three times longer than in higher light. Triton pepper plants grown under a continuous photoperiod were slightly taller than those grown using a 16 hr photoperiod. Micro-Tina tomatoes grown under continuous light had no chlorosis but were twice as tall as those grown using the 16 hr photoperiod. Peas were the most adapted crop. Neither the height nor the life cycle was extended by low light nor affected by photoperiod length. The yield of peas, however, is proportional to the light level and, although less than peas grown under high light, was the same between the two photoperiods

The Ecology of New World Rodent Borne Hemorrhagic Fevers

Few, if any, human settlements are free of peridomestic rodent populations. The threat of rodent borne zoonotic diseases has been widely recognized since the bubonic plague outbreaks of the Middle Ages. In the last decades, outbreaks of human disease caused by the rodent borne hemorrhagic fever viruses, the arenaviruses (family Arenaviridae), and the hantaviruses (family Bunyaviridae, genus Hantavirus) have again generated interest in the general public and scientific community regarding the biology of these types of diseases. Recent studies have identified more than 30 new members of these two groups of viruses. Most are associated with rodents in the family Muridae and many are known to be pathogenic. Ongoing studies are investigating aspects of the ecology and systematics of these viruses and their reservoirs. Ecological studies are currently examining modes of transmission between members of the host species, and environmental factors associated with increased frequency of infection. Systematic research is identifying patterns of co-evolution between the viruses and their hosts. The overall goal of these research efforts is develop predictive models that will identify times and places of increased risk and therefore provide an opportunity for risk reduction in these areas. The information resulting from these efforts will benefit individuals who live or work in close proximity to known wild rodent reservoirs and are at risk of contracting rodent borne diseases

Functional Analysis of Duplicated NF-YB Genes in Photoperiod-Dependent Flowering

The heterotrimeric transcription factor NUCLEAR FACTOR Y (NF-Y) regulates photoperiod-dependent flowering and is composed of NF-YA, NF-YB, and NF-YC subunits. In higher plants, such as Arabidopsis thaliana, whole genome duplication (WGD) leads to an evolutionary expansion of NF-Y subunits. NF-YB and NF-YC proteins have a highly conserved histone-like fold domain (HFD) and flanking variable amino (N) and carboxy (C) terminals. NF-YB proteins have known roles in the control of floral induction, with the nf-yb2 nf-yb3 mutant displaying a late-flowering phenotype. To better understand their ability to regulate photoperiod-dependent flowering from a structure/function perspective, 10 NF-YB HFD were overexpressed in nf-yb2 nf-yb3. The HFD alone could rescue the late-flowering phenotype of nf-yb2 nf-yb3, except NF-YB4. While full-length NF-YB1 cannot rescue late flowering, while Full-length NF-YB2 rescues the nf-yb2 nf-yb3 phenotype, similar to wild-type. Chimeric experiments between NF-YB1 and NF-YB2 show that NF-YB2 N and C termini decrease the success of NF-YB1 HFD to rescue nf-yb2 nf-yb3. Meaning the N and C termini have evolved to modulate the functionality of the NF-YB HFD, and cannot enhance NF-YB1 HFD ability to promote flowering. My structure and function analysis of the NF-YB family displays a unique case of subfunctionalization called Escape from Adaptive Conflict (EAC), the ability of a duplicated gene to obtain a novel function while still maintaining its ancestral role. The ancestral role is designated in the HFD where most of the action for floral initiation resides, however, the variable N and C termini can only modulate the primary functionality of their native NF-YB HFD

Developing generic and modular approaches to targeted cancer cell therapeutics

The intricacies and complexities of cancer render it a difficult disease to treat, and existing treatments are frequently non-selective. This project investigated two selective cancer therapeutic approaches: organelle-targeted drug delivery, and genetic re-wiring to achieve a switchable CAR-T model. Cancer mitochondria are different to healthy cells, including a higher mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP) which can be exploited for selective delivery of a therapeutic. Cyanine dyes Cy3 and Cy5, along with a dimer Cy3- Cy5 and a CPP conjugate Cy3-Cy5-R8 were characterised, and all constructs stained the mitochondria of HeLa in an MMP-dependent manner. Staining capacities of Cy3, Cy5 and Cy3-Cy5 were not hindered by serum proteins or endocytosis inhibition. Conversely, serum proteins reduced Cy3-Cy5-R8 staining capacities, and its uptake was endocytosis-dependent. Cy3 was subsequently tested as a mitochondrial-drug delivery vehicle, and Cy3 conjugation to mitochondrial toxins improved EC50 values by up to 1000-fold. The Cy3-drug conjugates were more toxic to cancerous (HeLa) vs noncancerous cells (HEK293), but toxicity was still present in HEK293. Further studies are therefore needed to enhance Cy3-drug selectivity to cancer cells. Cancers can alternatively be targeted via CAR-T cell immunotherapy; however, CAR-T frequently over-activate and bring unwanted toxicity to the patient. Through genetic code expansion, a new logic gates approach was developed. 11 quadruplet-decoding pyrrolysyl tRNA variants that incorporate BocK were analysed. Unlike their literature representation in E. coli, only five variants were functional in HEK293. Increasing tRNA copy number from 1 to 4 improved BocK-incorporation, and PylRS/tRNA was found to function orthogonally alongside a mutant TyrRS/tRNA pair. A split GFP reporter system was subsequently developed, where AND and OR logic operations were successfully generated whereby GFP output can be controlled via the unnatural amino acid makeup of the cellular media. The cell circuits developed here provide a new approach to mammalian cell logic operations, and can potentially be translated into a switchable ON/OFF CAR-T model