Adipokines as Drug Targets to Combat Adverse Effects of Excess Adipose Tissue

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Publications

Assessing the efficiency of mother-to-child HIV prevention in low- and middle-income countries using DEA: an exploratory study

Publication . Santos, Sérgio Pereira dos; Amado, Carla; Santos, Mauro

AIDS is one of the most significant health care problems worldwide. Due to the difficulty and costs involved in treating HIV, preventing infection is of paramount importance in controlling the AIDS epidemic. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to establish international comparisons on the efficiency of implementation of HIV prevention programmes. To do this we use data from 52 low- and middle-income countries regarding the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Preliminary results indicate that there is a remarkable variation in the efficiency of prevention services across nations, suggesting that a better use of resources could lead to more and improved services, and ultimately, prevent the infection of thousands of children.

2011-07Conference object

Restricted access

Identification of quantitative trait loci relating to flowering time, flag leaf and awn characteristics in a novel triticum dicoccum mapping population

Publication . Wright, Tally I.C.; Burnett, Angela C.; Griffiths, Howard; Kadner, Maxime; Powell, James S.; Oliveira, Hugo R.; Leigh, Fiona J.

Tetraploid landraces of wheat harbour genetic diversity that could be introgressed into modern bread wheat with the aid of marker-assisted selection to address the genetic diversity bottleneck in the breeding genepool. A novel bi-parental Triticum turgidum ssp. dicoccum Schrank mapping population was created from a cross between two landrace accessions differing for multiple physiological traits. The population was phenotyped for traits hypothesised to be proxies for characteristics associated with improved photosynthesis or drought tolerance, including flowering time, awn length, flag leaf length and width, and stomatal and trichome density. The mapping individuals and parents were genotyped with the 35K Wheat Breeders' single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array. A genetic linkage map was constructed from 104 F4 individuals, consisting of 2066 SNPs with a total length of 3295 cM and an average spacing of 1.6 cM. Using the population, 10 quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for five traits were identified in two years of trials. Three consistent QTLs were identified over both trials for awn length, flowering time and flag leaf width, on chromosomes 4A, 7B and 5B, respectively. The awn length and flowering time QTLs correspond with the major loci Hd and Vrn-B3, respectively. The identified marker-trait associations could be developed for marker-assisted selection, to aid the introgression of diversity from a tetraploid source into modern wheat for potential physiological trait improvement.

2020Journal article

Open access

Funding agency

European Commission

Funding programme

FP7

Funding Award Number

201100