Modern-day amphibians are known to be suffering rates of extinction that far exceed any other class of vertebrates, including those experienced by mammals and birds, and nearly one third of amphibian species are threatened. The question of why amphibians are going extinct at these accelerated rates has puzzled scientists for three decades. A clue to the mystery came about when scientists working in Central America and Australia noted that the declines in amphibian biodiversity were spreading in a wave-like manner, from a point source. These patterns of decline were caused by an emerging infectious disease, and in 1997 researchers discovered the fungal pathogen and named it Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd). Since then, our research has been focused on finding out where the fungus is, where it is spreading to and what its effect is on amphibian biodiversity. We have made a mapping tool at www.bd-maps.net and this has shown that Bd occurs on all continents with amphibians. However, not all species and populations infected with Bd die, suggesting to us that there may be more than one strain (or lineage) of Bd and that these are not all equally destructive. Confirmation of this came when we used new whole genome sequencing technology to sequence isolates of Bd from around the world. We discovered three lineages of Bd, and showed that only one of them is responsible for mass mortalities and species declines. We named this lineage BdGPL for 'Bd Global Panzootic Lineage' and showed that it occured in Africa, Europe, Australia and America. Currently, several lines of argument suggest that BdGPL evolved in Africa. We will investigate this 'Bd Out-of-Africa' hypothesis by sequencing the genomes of Bd isolates widely across Africa and Europe, and undertaking fine-scale studies of the pathogens impact where it has been introduced into new environments. Our project will investigate both broad- and fine-scale processes, by characterising the genome diversity of Bd at the continental-level, but also focusing on fine-scale evolutionary patterns in Africa, the Pyrenees, the Alps and the UK. We will twin these genomic approaches with experimental approaches in order to determine whether invasive 'outbreak' lineages have altered their virulence and infectivity owing to accelerated evolution by the action of natural selection. Here, our expectation is that outbreak lineages that are adapting to new environments and hosts will have increased virulence and transmission rates when compared against the ancestral lineage in its original geographic background. These experiments will not only give us added certainty when determining the geographic origins of these infections, but will also allow us to assess why BdGPL is so much more virulent, and transmittable, than the other lineages of Bd. More widely, our research will inform us about the risk that new pathogens pose to uninfected environments. Currently, we are seeing many emerging pathogenic fungi causing untold destruction to forests, bats and frogs. Perhaps there are common processes that underlie these emergences of disease - not only global trade in infected goods but also genome-level processes that are unique to fungi? Projects such as that described here hold the key to answering these important questions before losses of biodiversity increase further.

This Network aims to bring together an international group of scholars from different disciplines (including architectural history, history, literature and music) with an interest in the cultures of Enlightenment, reform and radicalism to discuss the complex of ways in which the practice, theory and experience of architecture contributed to debates about modernity and urban experience in the decades around 1800. It will do so through lens of the life of Thomas Rickman (1776-1841), which provides a springboard for discussing many of the issues involved. His internationally influential work, 'An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture' (Liverpool, 1817) was the first architectural 'best seller', through which the educated public were taught how to identify and discuss architectural styles. Through studying and writing about architecture, Rickman transformed his identity from depressed bankrupt exile to successful professional architect. Rickman was closely associated with reformist circles, his architectural research was informed by methods of classification learned from the natural sciences and he was a pioneer of new methods of construction, but as a successful practitioner he worked for a wide range of clients, from wealthy industrialists, to Anglican parishes, municipal corporations and Cambridge colleges. His career - and the associated buildings and archive - provides a connecting thread across this project, a springing point for addressing broader research questions and engaging the general public through a touring exhibition, website and associated workshops and walking tours devoted to his life and work. Many of today's debates about the contribution of buildings, both new and old, to societal wellbeing have their counterparts in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourse and juxtaposing the two will contribute a historical dimension to discussion of modern planning and heritage policies. Through networking symposia in Liverpool and London, and research workshops with site visits to buildings in Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham, the Network will address how, in addition to its existing role as the most prestigious public site of display, architecture became a site of social experiment, embodying decisive shifts in medical, penal and educational theory, to be tested through the impact of new building forms. These debates intertwined buildings and books in a virtual sphere but the public sphere also had a spatial dimension: the new libraries, news rooms and lecture theatres in which such debates were encountered and performed and the transformation of towns through public and private investment (actual and anticipated) through which modernity was imagined and experienced. These involved changing patterns of patronage, funding and building, contributing to the professionalisation of the architect and the emergence of general contracting. The Network aims to frame public discourse about architecture in relation to the transformation of the public sphere, both through changes in print culture and contemporary economic and social changes wrought by war, capitalisation, industrialisation and urbanisation. Through print and travel, this discourse had a global dimension and the Network will develop international connections in order to enable a globally comparative approach. Our objective is to build capacity for ongoing collaboration and future international comparative research.

Contract farming is growing rapidly in Eastern Africa. This research project will evaluate innovations in contract farming operations designed to increase the benefits wives accrue from the contract. It also evaluates whether this improves the relationship between the household and the firm. It integrates a gender dimension into an otherwise gender-blind area of practice and research. Contract farming is a form of vertical integration within agricultural commodity chains such that a firm has greater control over the production process and final product. Changes in the demand for and supply of agricultural products have increased the popularity of this form of vertical integration in many low-income countries and it is attracting considerable policy and academic attention. While academic work in the 1980s and 1990s offered a mixed assessment of the extent to which contract farming engaged with and benefited smallholders, recent literature offers a much more positive interpretation of smallholder participation. That said, there are still considerable risks for both firms and farms such that contracting operations frequently collapse. For firms, there is a large risk of smallholders side-marketing both inputs and produce. There are also numerous risks for small-scale producers. Two risks are especially important for smallholders: contracting can contribute to a loss of autonomy and control over farm enterprises and a form of dependency on the contracting firm; and, second, the intra-household distribution of labour/income can be altered to the detriment of women's interests. This research project focuses on the last of these risks through evaluating innovations that seek to both increase wives' benefits and to improve the relationships between the firm and the household. This is through adding gender-specific elements to the contract to increase the 'self-enforcement range'. By this we mean that by adding these extra investments within the contract we reduce the likelihood of either party breaking the deal due to a change in market or contextual conditions. The overarching research question is: To what extent and how do gender-specific clauses within contracts improve outcomes for both farms and firms? The subsidiary research questions are: To what extent and how do gender-specific clauses improve the benefits wives accrue from contract farming operations? To what extent and how do such clauses influence farm production? And to what extent and how do such clauses improve the stability and longevity of contract farming relationships? In Malawi, we evaluate the inclusion of a contract for wives to grow and market groundnuts (a conventional crop for women to produce) alongside tobacco to examine effects on yields, prices and, most importantly, the intra-household distribution of labour/income. We do this by combining a randomized design - where members and clubs are randomly assigned the innovation - with a series of qualitative research methods including life history interviews and focus group discussions. The attrition rate (in other words, the number of households dropping from the scheme) will assess whether the farm/firm relationship has changed. In Tanzania, we utilise the same methodology and sequence of research methods but the precise contractual innovation will be determined during the first two months of the project. In the second phase of research, we extend the project to examine gender-specific innovations in palm oil in Ghana and tobacco in Zimbabwe.

Great advances have been made in the development of proto-cells based on giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs). However, one essential functional element of all living cells still to be incorporated into such systems is a glycocalyx. This coating of complex carbohydrates extends up to 100 nm from the cell membrane and provides an adhesive layer that mediates interactions between different cell types, viruses and signalling molecules. In most cases, these interactions involve specific carbohydrate-binding proteins (lectins) which may be either soluble or membrane-bound. For example, fertilisation is initiated by a specific carbohydrate on the surface of the egg adhering to a specific lectin on the head of the sperm. Protein-carbohydrate interactions also mediate the endocytosis of many bacteria, viruses and bacterial toxins which stick to specific glycolipids on the cell membrane. Protein-carbohydrate interactions thus present a general strategy for enabling cell adhesion and cell entry. In this project we will design and create a modular toolbox of synthetic glcocalyx components and engineered lectins that will be attached to lipid membranes to enable reversible proto-cell adhesion and incorporated into virus-like particles to mediate proto-cell entry. The methodology will be exemplified through the construction of proto-cells that contain "proto-organelles" and the assembly and remodelling of "proto-tissues" in which multiple types of proto-cells are brought together in a pre-defined fashion to create more complex systems.

Alzheimer's disease is a major problem to UK society. Because of the ageing population, the number of people with dementia will increase dramatically in the next years: from about 850,000 today to 1,000,000 by 2025. The current annual cost of dementia to the UK is £26 billion even not everybody with dementia receives a diagnosis. Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia and it is particularly difficult to diagnose because there are no objective biomarkers for it and the diagnosis relies on the medical history of the patient. We need better ways to detect and monitor the changes that Alzheimer's disease causes in the brain. To achieve this, we will consider the electroencephalogram (EEG), an affordable piece of equipment that can be used outside hospitals to measure brain activity safely at several locations over the scalp (called "channels"). We will create new signal processing tools to analyse EEG brain networks. Doing so will lead to objective ways to monitor Alzheimer's disease. Namely, this interdisciplinary project will develop a novel set of processing techniques based on tensor factorisations to inspect how the components of brain activity networks change with time. We will then implement methods to compare the temporal profiles of the components estimated for different groups of people (e.g., healthy people versus patients). Our project is motivated by the facts that: 1) the EEG can measure fast changes in brain activity, 2) Alzheimer's disease damages brain connections, and 3) preliminary results indicate that Alzheimer's disease affects the temporal behaviour of brain activity. Indeed, there is an increasing interest in understanding brain activity networks and their evolution with time, as this would open up radically new ways to monitor brain diseases. Promising pilot results have reported in, e.g., Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis but, currently, there are no appropriate ways to inspect how the networks change with time systematically. Instead, we will develop a framework based on tensor factorisations (a set of algebraic and computational techniques to analyse tensors: n-mode data arrays with n>=3) to inspect the components of networks directly from the data without the need for manual intervention. We will then apply it to EEG signals. First, for each person, we will assess the coupling between channels of the EEG as a function of time and frequency. These results naturally fit into a multi-modal representation: a "connectivity tensor". Then, we will decompose the "connectivity tensor" into its underlying components. We will implement constraints to bring previous information into the decompositions, including novel ways to measure the natural organisation of the network components. Finally, we will assess the robustness of the extracted network components and we will inspect how Alzheimer's disease changes them. We will apply our methods to two different sets of EEG signals measured from patients with Alzheimer's disease, people with mild cognitive impairment (a condition that sometimes precedes Alzheimer's disease), and healthy volunteers. One of the EEG datasets measured the activity of the brain at rest using a small number of channels, whereas the other has been recorded during a short-term memory task that has shown promise in the detection of early Alzheimer's disease with a larger number of EEG channels. Hence, we believe that revealing how the EEG network changes with time during this task could lead to a non-invasive, affordable and portable tool to monitor Alzheimer's disease. Nonetheless, this project will have much wider implications because it will benefit the signal processing, tensor factorisation and network analysis communities and the techniques will be readily applicable to other types of data, both inside and outside clinical settings.