Building Resilience and Sustainability in Lowland Scottish ‘Treescape’ Management Regimes : ‘Voices of the Future’/Re-imagining the Commons

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Analysis of Globulin-1 promoter activity and the expression of GFP in transgenic maize seed tissues and processing of GFP-containing grain

The maize (Zea mays L) kernel is perfectly configured to store proteins and nutrients. The major proteins of the maize kernel are known as seed storage proteins because they have no enzymatic function and they accumulate to a high level for use during germination of the seed as an immediate nutrient source. These seed storage proteins are responsible for much of the nutrient quality of maize when used as a food or feed source. Understanding the regulation of seed storage protein deposition may allow researchers to improve the use of maize grain in a variety of food and feed products, as well as industrial and pharmaceutical applications. To understand the regulation of seed storage proteins and to improve the uses of maize grain, we have created transgenic maize lines that express the reporter gene Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) under the control of seed storage protein promoters. Therefore, GFP is developmentally and spatially regulated similar to seed storage proteins. Our results indicate that GFP is expressed in seed tissues similar to seed storage proteins. To better utilize grain by dry-milling, we subjected the GFP transgenic grain to a dry-milling process and tracked its recovery. From the results we determined that optimization of dry-milling processes can be accomplished using GFP grain. To better express GFP, and other recombinant proteins in maize kernels, we developed a chimeric promoter that can express GFP in multiple seed tissues. Our results indicate that the chimeric promoter has endosperm and embryo tissue specificity, and that this promoter can be used to express recombinant proteins in maize kernels. To better understand the activity of the Glb1 promoter, we performed experiments that resulted in the correlation of immature leaf activity of the Glb1 promoter with a complex rearrangement within the Glb1 promoter due to transposon transposition events

The Fedderate Charter and its implications for the thirteenth-century social and economic landscapes of North-east Scotland

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Mayall:a framework for desktop JavaScript auditing and post-exploitation analysis

Writing desktop applications in JavaScript offers developers the opportunity to write cross-platform applications with cutting edge capabilities. However in doing so, they are potentially submitting their code to a number of unsanctioned modifications from malicious actors. Electron is one such JavaScript application framework which facilitates this multi-platform out-the-box paradigm and is based upon the Node.js JavaScript runtime --- an increasingly popular server-side technology. In bringing this technology to the client-side environment, previously unrealized risks are exposed to users due to the powerful system programming interface that Node.js exposes. In a concerted effort to highlight previously unexposed risks in these rapidly expanding frameworks, this paper presents the Mayall Framework, an extensible toolkit aimed at JavaScript security auditing and post-exploitation analysis. The paper also exposes fifteen highly popular Electron applications and demonstrates that two thirds of applications were found to be using known vulnerable elements with high CVSS scores. Moreover, this paper discloses a wide-reaching and overlooked vulnerability within the Electron Framework which is a direct byproduct of shipping the runtime unaltered with each application, allowing malicious actors to modify source code and inject covert malware inside verified and signed applications without restriction. Finally, a number of injection vectors are explored and appropriate remediations are proposed

A taxonomy of approaches for integrating attack awareness in applications

Software applications are subject to an increasing number of attacks, resulting in data breaches and financial damage. Many solutions have been considered to help mitigate these attacks, such as the integration of attack-awareness techniques. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy illustrating how existing attack awareness techniques can be integrated into applications. This work provides a guide for security researchers and developers, aiding them when choosing the approach which best fits the needs of their application

Mandelaism in newspaper advertising that ‘pays tribute’ to Mandela after his death

Abstract: Celebrated, Former President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s death in 2013 saw an outpouring of local and global grief and emotion. This reflected how Mandela became iconized as a popular cultural and political symbol for human rights, political messiah-hood, sainthood, dignity, peace and forgiveness. Even Mandela attempted to deflect and qualify this iconisation. Taking critical views into account, we propose ‘Mandelaism’ as a term to describe the cultural practices and sign systems that surround and mythologize Mandela, intermeshing with, feeding into and parasitically drawing on patriotic sentiments. Mandelaism magically invokes powers and forms of what Mbembe (2001: 25) calls the commandement – to conflate and inflate often weak notions and practices of the right. Popularly, these powers are invoked for nation building. However Mandelaism is also tightly associated with self-serving machinations that deform and weaken this right which legitimates it. This study explores advertisements from selected national English-language newspapers published in the two weeks that followed his death, subjecting them to a semiotic analysis. It thereby aims to recognize aspects of Mandelaism and of the parasite behaviors which we claim are appended to it. The unprecedented scale of the news-event that was Mandela death and funeral assures that the study is set in one of the greatest known nationalistic imaginariums

The mechanism of endoplasmic reticulum oxidoreductase 1 α (Ero1α) inactivation

Ero1α is a resident ER oxidase and is an important member of the oxidative protein folding machinery. It generates disulphide bonds de novo and donates them to protein disulphide isomerase (PDI), which in turn oxidises nascent substrate proteins within the ER. Ero1 activity must be tightly regulated for two key reasons: (i) it must maintain the balance of oxidised PDI to ensure oxidative protein folding can occur, but cannot be so active that the ER becomes hyperoxidising and dysfunctional, and (ii) Ero1 activity must be regulated to prevent the accumulation of hydrogen peroxide, a reactive oxygen species (ROS), within the ER. The regulation of Ero1α comes principally from 3 intramolecular disulphide bonds which are reduced by substrate upon activation, and re-oxidised upon inactivation by an unknown mechanism. Using an SDS-PAGE based assay we tested three hypotheses: that sulphenylation by Ero1α-produced hydrogen peroxide could induce re-oxidation; that an internal disulphide exchange mechanism could generate and distribute disulphide bonds within Ero1α; and that ER oxidoreductases could act to inactivate Ero1α. Having successfully expressed, purified and characterised a recombinant version of Ero1α, this was tested in a number of assays to address the above hypotheses. In vitro findings show that Ero1α is specifically and rapidly oxidised by ERp46 and PDI. Sulphenylation and internal disulphide exchange-mediated oxidation of Ero1α provided a comparatively slow and incomplete method of re-oxidation. In vivo results suggest that ERp46 and PDI may have implications in Ero1α activity regulation. Overexpression of several ER oxidoreductases had no effect on Ero1α re-oxidation after DTT challenge, whereas Ero1α oxidation was impaired slightly in PDI- ERp46 double knockdown cells. Depletion of PDI from cells results in the DTT-resistance of Ero1α, suggesting that Ero1α, PDI and glutathione are involved in an intricate mechanism of sensing and reacting to ER redox conditions. Two key ER oxidoreductases, PDI and ERp57, are oxidised in semi-permeabilised cells. Oxidation coincides with permeabilisation of the plasma membrane and the removal of cytosolic glutathione, directly implicating glutathione in the maintainence of the redox states of ER oxidoreductases. Oxidation during the permeabilisation of cells is an enzymatic process which is mediated in part by Ero1α. Semi-permeabilised cells harbour a more oxidising environment than do microsomes. This study contributes significantly to the research field by complementing several previously reported findings, as well as providing a novel investigation into the molecular regulation of Ero1α and its relationship with PDI and glutathione in the cell

Poster: Angry birding:evaluating application exceptions as attack canaries

Application exceptions are anomalous events occurring within the application. These can be caused by common issues such as simple programming errors; however, they can also originate from the side-effects of a trial-and-error process used in active attacks. Utilising attacker-induced exceptions as a canary for intrusion detection has been demonstrated as a feasible technique for SQL injection detection, but this has not been applied to other types of attacks. This paper proposes an approach to consider attacker-induced application exceptions as attack canaries. The work is part of an ongoing investigation on integrating detective defences into applications through established development practices