Technology Intensive and Sustainable Schools: A Discourse Analysis of Statements regarding the Use of ICT in Education in Lund

This thesis investigates the perceptions of people within the education sector in Lund Municipality regarding sustainability implications of the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in schools. It demonstrates how local perceptions are largely affected by powerful global neoliberal forces. The study is based on a critical discourse analysis of policy documents and interviews with municipal employees. Technology is regarded as a social, cultural and political phenomenon. The theoretical framework of the study is based on the idea of technology fetishism and the five capitals model of sustainability. In the analysis of the empirical material, the CDA approach of N. Fairclough was adopted. The analysis shows that there is a discursive struggle between hegemonic neoliberal economic and digital society discourses, and a critical discourse. In addition, a number of sub-discourses appear in the texts. According to the findings, headmasters are mostly positive about the possibility of creating technology intensive and sustainable schools. The study reveals that local actions are affected by technology fetishistic ideals and the destructive relationship to natural capital that exist in today's industrialised society. Although individual schools cannot change the world order, they can serve as role models in the creation of technology intensive and sustainable schools through the promotion of learning, citizenship and equality. In so doing, they can minimise the reduction of natural capital as a result of the use of ICT, and contribute to the maintenance and enhancement of natural, human and social capital

A group of ectomycorrhizal fungi restricts organic matter accumulation in boreal forest

Boreal forest soils are important global carbon sinks, with significant storage in the organic topsoil. Decomposition of these stocks requires oxidative enzymes, uniquely produced by fungi. Across Swedish boreal forests, we found that local carbon storage in the organic topsoil was 33% lower in the presence of a group of closely related species of ectomycorrhizal fungi - Cortinarius acutus s.l.. This observation challenges the prevailing view that ectomycorrhizal fungi generally act to increase carbon storage in soils but supports the idea that certain ectomycorrhizal fungi can complement free-living decomposers, maintaining organic matter turnover, nutrient cycling and tree productivity under nutrient-poor conditions. The indication that a narrow group of fungi may exert a major influence on carbon cycling questions the prevailing dogma of functional redundancy among microbial decomposers. Cortinarius acutus s.l. responds negatively to stand-replacing disturbance, and associated population declines are likely to increase soil carbon sequestration while impeding long-term nutrient cycling

Overoxidation of chloroplast 2-Cys peroxiredoxins: balancing toxic and signaling activities of hydrogen peroxide

Photosynthesis, the primary source of biomass and oxygen into the biosphere, involves the transport of electrons in the presence of oxygen and, therefore, chloroplasts constitute an important source of reactive oxygen species, including hydrogen peroxide. If accumulated at high level, hydrogen peroxide may exert a toxic effect; however, it is as well an important second messenger. In order to balance the toxic and signaling activities of hydrogen peroxide its level has to be tightly controlled. To this end, chloroplasts are equipped with different antioxidant systems such as 2-Cys peroxiredoxins (2-Cys Prxs), thiol-based peroxidases able to reduce hydrogen and organic peroxides. At high peroxide concentrations the peroxidase function of 2-Cys Prxs may become inactivated through a process of overoxidation. This inactivation has been proposed to explain the signaling function of hydrogen peroxide in eukaryotes, whereas in prokaryotes, the 2-Cys Prxs of which were considered to be insensitive to overoxidation, the signaling activity of hydrogen peroxide is less relevant. Here we discuss the current knowledge about the mechanisms controlling 2-Cys Prx overoxidation in chloroplasts, organelles with an important signaling function in plants. Given the prokaryotic origin of chloroplasts, we discuss the occurrence of 2-Cys Prx overoxidation in cyanobacteria with the aim of identifying similarities between chloroplasts and their ancestors regarding their response to hydrogen peroxide.España , Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación BIO2010-15430España, Junta de Andalucía BIO-182España, Junta de Andalucía CVI-591

The UNITE database for molecular identification and taxonomic communication of fungi and other eukaryotes : sequences, taxa and classifications reconsidered

Acknowledgements We acknowledge Marie Zirk for her work in designing the UNITE logotype and creating the visual abstract for this article. Funding UNITE database development is financed by the Estonian Research Council [PRG1170]; European Union's Horizon 2020 project BGE [101059492]. The PlutoF digital infrastructure is supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 project BiCIKL [101007492]; Estonian Research Infrastructure roadmap project DiSSCo Estonia. Funding for open access charge: UNITE Community. Conflict of interest statement. None declared.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Molecular basis of targeted therapy in T/NKcell lymphoma/leukemia: A comprehensive genomic and immunohistochemical analysis of a panel of 33 cell lines

T and NK-cell lymphoma is a collection of aggressive disorders with unfavorable outcome, in which targeted treatments are still at a preliminary phase. To gain deeper insights into the deregulated mechanisms promoting this disease, we searched a panel of 31 representative T-cell and 2 NK-cell lymphoma/leukemia cell lines for predictive markers of response to targeted therapy. To this end, targeted sequencing was performed alongside the expression of specific biomarkers corresponding to potentially activated survival pathways. The study identified TP53, NOTCH1 and DNMT3A as the most frequently mutated genes. We also found common alterations in JAK/STAT and epigenetic pathways. Immunohistochemical analysis showed nuclear accumulation of MYC (in 85% of the cases), NFKB (62%), p-STAT (44%) and p-MAPK (30%). This panel of cell lines captures the complexity of T/NK-cell lymphoproliferative processes samples, with the partial exception of AITL cases. Integrated mutational and immunohistochemical analysis shows that mutational changes cannot fully explain the activation of key survival pathways and the resulting phenotypes. The combined integration of mutational/expression changes forms a useful tool with which new compounds may be assayed

Understanding the Origins of Bacterial Resistance to Aminoglycosides through Molecular Dynamics Mutational Study of the Ribosomal A-Site

Paromomycin is an aminoglycosidic antibiotic that targets the RNA of the bacterial small ribosomal subunit. It binds in the A-site, which is one of the three tRNA binding sites, and affects translational fidelity by stabilizing two adenines (A1492 and A1493) in the flipped-out state. Experiments have shown that various mutations in the A-site result in bacterial resistance to aminoglycosides. In this study, we performed multiple molecular dynamics simulations of the mutated A-site RNA fragment in explicit solvent to analyze changes in the physicochemical features of the A-site that were introduced by substitutions of specific bases. The simulations were conducted for free RNA and in complex with paromomycin. We found that the specific mutations affect the shape and dynamics of the binding cleft as well as significantly alter its electrostatic properties. The most pronounced changes were observed in the U1406C∶U1495A mutant, where important hydrogen bonds between the RNA and paromomycin were disrupted. The present study aims to clarify the underlying physicochemical mechanisms of bacterial resistance to aminoglycosides due to target mutations

Tree diversity and species identity effects on soil fungi, protists and animals are context dependent

Plant species richness and the presence of certain influential species (sampling effect) drive the stability and functionality of ecosystems as well as primary production and biomass of consumers. However, little is known about these floristic effects on richness and community composition of soil biota in forest habitats owing to methodological constraints. We developed a DNA metabarcoding approach to identify the major eukaryote groups directly from soil with roughly species-level resolution. Using this method, we examined the effects of tree diversity and individual tree species on soil microbial biomass and taxonomic richness of soil biota in two experimental study systems in Finland and Estonia and accounted for edaphic variables and spatial autocorrelation. Our analyses revealed that the effects of tree diversity and individual species on soil biota are largely context dependent. Multiple regression and structural equation modelling suggested that biomass, soil pH, nutrients and tree species directly affect richness of different taxonomic groups. The community composition of most soil organisms was strongly correlated due to similar response to environmental predictors rather than causal relationships. On a local scale, soil resources and tree species have stronger effect on diversity of soil biota than tree species richness per se

FungalTraits:A user-friendly traits database of fungi and fungus-like stramenopiles

The cryptic lifestyle of most fungi necessitates molecular identification of the guild in environmental studies. Over the past decades, rapid development and affordability of molecular tools have tremendously improved insights of the fungal diversity in all ecosystems and habitats. Yet, in spite of the progress of molecular methods, knowledge about functional properties of the fungal taxa is vague and interpretation of environmental studies in an ecologically meaningful manner remains challenging. In order to facilitate functional assignments and ecological interpretation of environmental studies we introduce a user friendly traits and character database FungalTraits operating at genus and species hypothesis levels. Combining the information from previous efforts such as FUNGuild and Fun(Fun) together with involvement of expert knowledge, we reannotated 10,210 and 151 fungal and Stramenopila genera, respectively. This resulted in a stand-alone spreadsheet dataset covering 17 lifestyle related traits of fungal and Stramenopila genera, designed for rapid functional assignments of environmental studies. In order to assign the trait states to fungal species hypotheses, the scientific community of experts manually categorised and assigned available trait information to 697,413 fungal ITS sequences. On the basis of those sequences we were able to summarise trait and host information into 92,623 fungal species hypotheses at 1% dissimilarity threshold

Shaping social and political identity : A critical discourse anlysis of the Bharatiya Janta Party

This research paper uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyse texts produced by the political party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India. The analysis use Machin and Mayr’s (2012) concepts of Language and Identity and Nominalisation and Presupposition with the aim to understand how the BJP can influence the democratic society in India through discourse. The texts analysed was taken from BJPs website and from parts of their 2014 manifesto. The theoretical framework and literature review are built on the role of Hinduism in the democratization of India. In this research, Hinduism act as an important factor in defining identity in India and Hindutva as an important factor in defining identity for the BJP. The analysis concludes that when looking at identity, the BJP demonstrate that their texts can have both a positive and a negative effect on the democracy in India. The BJP strongly use ‘India First’ to state that they want to unify the country under one identity and similarities can be drawn to their previous use of ‘Hindutva’. By promoting ‘India First’ the BJP includes a large audience and a somewhat tolerant outlook by stating to include all castes and ethnicities. However, the analysis demonstrates that their strong promotion of ‘India First’ conceal who is responsible to uphold this identity and that in turn could affect the tolerance in society. The analysis also shows that their definition of ‘India First’ is left vague and this can conceal certain interest. Their use of ‘India First’ as an identity can lead to a fear that everything that does not belong under this category is a threat. This combined with the diffuse definition of what ‘India First’ mean can have a negative effect on the pluralistic and tolerant society that was needed for India to transform to a democracy. The research also explores whether the strong promotion of ‘India First’ can be compared to a religious or spiritual movement and touch upon the implications that could follow from that

What does it mean to be a global citizen? : A qualitative interview study with Indian and Nepalese young adults concerning their perceptions of global citizenship

Today's increasingly interconnected world creates new challenges related to the use and understanding of the concept of citizenship. The idea of a global citizenship is not new; however, in recent years there has been an evolution of increasing research leading to the expansion of interest with regard to the exploration of the concept and how it could be implemented in practice. This study attempts to deepen the understanding of the qualitatively different ways of perceiving this concept amongst a number of Indian and Nepalese young adults. The study is based on a phenomenographic research approach, where the data material was collected through semi-structured interviews. The results of the study show that global citizenship can be perceived as being related to equality, cultural diversity, global responsibility, global communication and cosmopolitan governance. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that the young adults perceive themselves either only as national citizens, or as both national and global citizens. Finally, the respondents believe that formal education can contribute to the promotion of global citizenship by including the concept in the educational curriculum and by encouraging cultural exchange. The role of formal education in promoting global citizenship is also perceived to be unclear due to terminological confusion