What semantic analysis can tell us about long term trends in the global STI policy agenda.

The scope, complexity and the "volume" of knowledge accumulated render producing an overview of the core themes of science, technology and innovation policies difficult. Reviews of this policy domain mostly either refer to general issues without deep immersion into details or focus on specific narrower aspects. The paper uses semantic analysis to identify major themes of science, technology and innovation policies over the last three decades and to trace their evolution towards current policy setting. We use semantic tools for processing and analysing documents produced by one of the major and highly reputable international expert bodies, the OECD Working Party on Technology and Innovation Policy. We show that selected themes remain in the mainstream even though being affected by regular policy adjustments and refinements and which disappear or appear with new challenges and expected solutions. Other themes appear niche or exotic themes which are under discussion for some time only.

Local capacity, innovative entrepreneurial places and global connections: an overview.

The globalisation trend of the past few decades, driven to a large extent by the proliferation of GVCs, has led to a set of significant changes in patterns of technology upgrading and new modes of interaction between domestic technology efforts and external sources of technological knowledge. Whether this new dynamic will lead to continuing increase in the economic importance of emerging economies will ultimately depend on whether their productivity growth will be driven by technology upgrading, requiring active and coordinated activity orchestrated by a variety of state and non-state actors under diverse sectoral, regional and national innovation systems. The new dynamic also reinforces the focus on local-global interfaces which becomes ever more important once we recognize that in the 21st century technology upgrading challenges depend much more on improvements in connectivity and on the industrial ecosystem. Still, the globalization process experienced in the past few decades-reflected in this collection of papers-may need to be recalibrated in the face of the drastic geopolitical changes that the process itself has brought about.

The role of UDP-glucose:hydroxycinnamate glucosyltransferases in phenylpropanoid metabolism and the response to UV-B radiation in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Arabidopsis harbors four UDP-glycosyltransferases that convert hydroxycinnamates (HCAs) to 1-O-beta-glucose esters, UGT84A1 (encoded by At4g15480), UGT84A2 (At3g21560), UGT84A3 (At4g15490), and UGT84A4 (At4g15500). To elucidate the role of the individual UGT84A enzymes in planta we analyzed gene expression, UGT activities and accumulation of phenylpropanoids in Arabidopsis wild type plants, ugt mutants and overexpressing lines. Individual ugt84A null alleles did not significantly reduce the gross metabolic flux to the accumulating compounds sinapoylcholine (sinapine) in seeds and sinapoylmalate in leaves. For the ugt84A2 mutant, LC/MS analysis revealed minor qualitative and quantitative changes of several HCA choline esters and of disinapoylspermidine in seeds. Overexpression of individual UGT84A genes caused increased enzyme activities but failed to produce significant changes in the pattern of accumulating HCA esters. For UGT84A3, our data tentatively suggest an impact on cell wall-associated 4-coumarate. Exposure of plants to enhanced UV-B radiation induced the UGT84A-encoding genes and led to a transient increase in sinapoylglucose and sinapoylmalate concentrations.

Dissection of a complex seed phenotype: novel insights of FUSCA3 regulated developmental processes.

A T-DNA insertion mutant of FUSCA3 (fus3-T) in Arabidopsis thaliana exhibits several of the expected deleterious effects on seed development, but not the formation of brown seeds, a colouration which results from the accumulation of large amounts of anthocyanin. A detailed phenotypic comparison between fus3-T and a known splice point mutant (fus3-3) revealed that the seeds from both mutants do not enter dormancy and can be rescued at an immature stage. Without rescue, mature fus3-3 seeds are non-viable, whereas those of fus3-T suffer only a slight loss in their germinability. A series of comparisons between the two mutants uncovered differences with respect to conditional lethality, in histological and sub-cellular features, and in the relative amounts of various storage compounds and metabolites present, leading to a further dissection of developmental processes in seeds and a partial reinterpretation of the complex seed phenotype. FUS3 function is now known to be restricted to the acquisition of embryo-dependent seed dormancy, the determination of cotyledonary cell identity, and the synthesis and accumulation of storage compounds. Based on DNA binding studies, a model is presented which can explain the differences between the mutant alleles. The fus3-T lesion is responsible for loss of function only, while the fus3-3 mutation induces various pleiotropic effects conditioned by a truncation gene product causing severe mis-differentiation.