Explorations in a meaning making system: Kerry as an entrepreneurial platform and the equine sector as a cluster

This Portfolio is about the changes that can be supported and achieved through transformational education that impacts on personal, professional and organisational levels. Having lived through an era of tremendous change over the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first the author has a great drawing board to contemplate in the context of professional career experience as an engineer. The ability to engage in ‘subject-object’ separation is the means by which Kegan (1994, 2009) explains that transformation takes place and the Essays in this Portfolio aim to support and bring about such change. Exploration of aspects of ‘Kerry’ is the material selected to both challenge support change in the way of knowing from being subject to certain information and knowledge that to being able to consider it more objectively. The task of being able to distance judgement about the economy and economic development of Kerry was facilitated by various readings around of a number of key thinkers including Kegan, Drucker, Porter and Penrose. The central themes of Kerry or the potential for economic development are built into each Essay. Essay One focuses on reflections of Kerry life - on Kerry people within and without Kerry - and events as they affected understandings of how people related to and worked with one another. These reflections formed the basis for transformational goals identified which required a shift from an engineering mindset to encompass an economics-based view. In Essay Two knowledge of economic concepts is developed by exploring the writings of Drucker, Penrose, and Porter with pertinence to considering economic development generally, and for Kerry in particular in the form of an ‘entrepreneurial platform’. The concepts and theories were the basis of explorations presented in Essays Three and Four. Essay Three focuses on Kerry’s potential for economic development give its current economic profile and includes results from interviews with selected businesses. Essay Four is an exercise in the application of Porter’s ‘Cluster’ concept to the equine sector.

Metacomputing on clusters augmented with reconfigurable hardware

Accepted Version

Nano-urchin: The formation and structure of high-density spherical clusters of vanadium oxide nanotubes

We report the observation of urchin-like nanostructures consisting of high-density spherical nanotube radial arrays of vanadium oxide nanocomposite, successfully synthesized by a simple chemical route using an ethanolic solution of vanadium tri-isopropoxide and alkyl amine hexadecylamine for 7 days at 180oC. The results show that the growth process of the NanoUrchin occurs in stages, starting with a radial self-organized arrangement of lamina followed by the rolling of the lamina into nanotubes. The longest nanotubes are measured to be several micrometers in length with diameters of ~120 nm and hollow centers typically measured to be ~75 nm. The NanoUrchin have an estimated density of nanotubes of ~40 sr-1. The tube walls comprise layers of vanadium oxide with the organic surfactant intercalated between atomic layers. The interlayer distance is measured to be 2.9 ± 0.1 nm and electron diffraction identified the vanadate phase in the VOx nanocomposite as orthorhombic V2O5. These nanostructures may be used as three-dimensional composite materials and as supports for other materials.

Exploiting the diverse microbial ecology of marine sponges

Marine sponges (phylum Porifera) are the oldest extant metazoan animals on earth and host large populations of symbiotic microbes: Bacteria, Archaea and unicellular Eukaryota. Those microbes play ecological functions which are essential to the health of the host including carbon, nitrogen and sulfur cycling as well as host defence through the production of bioactive secondary metabolites which protect against infection and predation. The diversity of sponge-associated microbes is remarkable with thousands of OTUs reported from individual sponge species. Amongst those populations are sponge-specific microbes which may be specific to sponges or specific to sponge species. While marine natural product discovery concerns many animal phyla, Porifera account for the largest proportion of novel compounds. Evidence suggests that many of these compounds are the products of symbiotic microbes. Descriptions of sponge-associated microbial community structures have been advanced by the development of next-generation sequencing technologies while the discovery and exploitation of sponge derived bioactive compounds has increased due to developments in sequence-based and function-based metagenomics. Here, we use pyrosequencing to describe the bacterial communities associated with two shallow, temperate water sponges (Raspailia ramosa and Stelligera stuposa) from Irish coastal waters and to describe the bacterial and archaeal communities of a single sponge species (Inflatella pellicula) from two different depths in deep waters in the Atlantic Ocean, including at a depth of 2900m, a depth far greater than that of any previous sequence-based sponge-microbe investigation. We identified diverse microbial communities in all sponges and the presence of sponge-specific taxa recruiting to previously described and novel spongespecific clusters. We also identified archaeal communities which dominated sponge-microbe communities. We demonstrate that sponge-associated microbial communities differ from seawater communities indicating host selection processes. We used sequence-based metagenomic techniques to identify genes of potential industrial and pharmacological interest in the metagenomes of various sponge species and functionbased metagenomic screening in an attempt to identify lipolytic and antibacterial activities from metagenomic clones from the metagenome of the marine sponge Stelletta normani. In addition we have cultured diverse bacterial species from sponge tissues, many of which display antimicrobial activities against clinically relevant bacterial and yeast test strains. Other isolates represent novel species in the genus Maribacter and require emendments to the description of that genus.

Reactivity of sub 1 nm supported clusters: (TiO2)(n) clusters supported on rutile TiO2 (110)

Metal oxide clusters of sub-nm dimensions dispersed on a metal oxide support are an important class of catalytic materials for a number of key chemical reactions, showing enhanced reactivity over the corresponding bulk oxide. In this paper we present the results of a density functional theory study of small sub-nm TiO2 clusters, Ti2O4, Ti3O6 and Ti4O8 supported on the rutile (110) surface. We find that all three clusters adsorb strongly with adsorption energies ranging from -3 eV to -4.5 eV. The more stable adsorption structures show a larger number of new Ti-O bonds formed between the cluster and the surface. These new bonds increase the coordination of cluster Ti and O as well as surface oxygen, so that each has more neighbours. The electronic structure shows that the top of the valence band is made up of cluster derived states, while the conduction band is made up of Ti 3d states from the surface, resulting in a reduction of the effective band gap and spatial separation of electrons and holes after photon absorption, which shows their potential utility in photocatalysis. To examine reactivity, we study the formation of oxygen vacancies in the cluster-support system. The most stable oxygen vacancy sites on the cluster show formation energies that are significantly lower than in bulk TiO2, demonstrating the usefulness of this composite system for redox catalysis.

Characterisation of the microbiota of traditional fermented beverages and screening these and other populations for novel antimicrobial producers and gene clusters

To screen for novel ribosomally synthesised antimicrobials, in-silico genome mining was performed on all publically available fully sequenced bacterial genomes. 49 novel type 1 lantibiotic clusters were identified from a number of species, genera and phyla not usually associated with lantibiotic production, and indicates high prevalence. A crucial step towards the commercialisation of fermented beverages is the characterisation of the microbial content. To achieve this goal, we applied next-generation sequencing techniques to analyse the bacterial and yeast populations of the organic, symbiotically-fermented beverages kefir, water kefir and kombucha. A number of minor components were revealed, many of which had not previously been associated with these beverages. The dominant microorganism in each of the water kefir grains and fermentates was Zymomonas, an ethanol-producing bacterium that had not previously been detected on such a scale. These studies represent the most accurate description of these populations to date, and should aid in future starter design and in determining which species are responsible for specific attributes of the beverages. Finally, high-throughput robotics was applied to screen for the presence of antimicrobial producers associated with these beverages. This revealed a low frequency of bacteriocin production amongst the bacterial isolates, with only lactococcins A, B and LcnN of lactococcin M being identified. However, a proteinaceous antimicrobial produced by the yeast Dekkera bruxellensis, isolated from kombucha, was found to be active against Lactobacillus bulgaricus. This peptide was patially purified.