A SMASHing approach for developing staff and student digital capabilities within a community of practice

SMASH is a student-led partnership which considers how social media could be used to enhance learning and teaching. Mentored by their tutor, members of the team identified three key areas where social media may be utilised: within learning activities, as a means of organising learning and as a way of showcasing learning. The three strands of this framework have provided a focus to develop a range of resources and the foundation for a digital toolkit. This case study reflects upon not just the outputs developed thus far, but also on the experience, the learning gained and the sense of belonging and identify as a result of being part of this community of practice

Protein kinase C is essential for viability of the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae

This is the final version of the article. Available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.Protein kinase C constitutes a family of serine-threonine kinases found in all eukaryotes and implicated in a wide range of cellular functions, including regulation of cell growth, cellular differentiation and immunity. Here, we present three independent lines of evidence which indicate that protein kinase C is essential for viability of Magnaporthe oryzae. First, all attempts to generate a target deletion of PKC1, the single copy protein kinase C-encoding gene, proved unsuccessful. Secondly, conditional gene silencing of PKC1 by RNA interference led to severely reduced growth of the fungus, which was reversed by targeted deletion of the Dicer2-encoding gene, MDL2. Finally, selective kinase inhibition of protein kinase C by targeted allelic replacement with an analogue-sensitive PKC1(AS) allele led to specific loss of fungal viability in the presence of the PP1 inhibitor. Global transcriptional profiling following selective PKC inhibition identified significant changes in gene expression associated with cell wall re-modelling, autophagy, signal transduction and secondary metabolism. When considered together, these results suggest protein kinase C is essential for growth and development of M. oryzae with extensive downstream targets in addition to the cell integrity pathway. Targeting protein kinase C signalling may therefore prove an effective means of controlling rice blast disease.This work was funded by a BBSRC CASE PhD studentship to TJP with support from Syngenta and a European Research Council, Advanced Investigator Award to NJT under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 294702 GENBLAST

Effect of projectile nose shape on ballistic resistance of interstitial-free steel sheets

In this paper an experimental and numerical work is reported concerning the process of perforation of thin steel plates using different projectile nose shapes. The main goal is to analyze how the projectile shape may change the ballistic properties of materials. A wide range of impact velocities from 35 to 180 m/s has been covered during the tests. All the projectiles were 13 mm in diameter and the targets were 1 mm thick, as such the projectile can be regarded as rigid and the target sheets were of interstitial-free (IF) steel. The mass ratio (projectile mass/steel sheet mass) and the ratio between the span of the steel sheet and the diameter of the projectile were kept constant, equal to 0.38 and 3.85 respectively. To define the thermoviscoplastic behavior of the target material, the Rusinek-Klepaczko (RK) constitutive model [1] was used. The complete identification of the material constants was done based on a rigorous material characterization. Numerical simulations of some experimental tests were carried out using a non-linear finite element code ABAQUS/Explicit. It was found that the numerical models are able to describe the physical mechanisms in the perforation process with a good accuracy.The National Centre of Research and Development under the grant WND-DEM-1-203/00