Novel insights into plant vascular development: disclosing a mechanism to maintain thermospermine homeostasis in the xylem

Dissertation presented to obtain the Ph.D degree in Biology

Internationalization strategy of Skypro Shoes to Japan

Skypro is a footwear brand targeted at the aviation professionals’ niche market, explored by the Portuguese microenterprise Abotoa Lda..The saturation of the Portuguese market led Skypro to expand to different worldwide countries and to be a footwear supplier of Airlines from the USA, Qatar or Australia, among others. Abotoa aims for its 2014’s exports to represent around 80% of total sales and this Internationalization Plan for Japan represents the possibility of further exploring the Asian market. Japan appears as the 2nd worldwide footwear importer and the 5th footwear consumer, with a high purchasing power – GDP per capita (PPP). This country possesses two enormous Airlines (ANA and JAL) that employ more than 15000 on-board personnel, the world’s 4th busiest Airport in 2013 (Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport) and a geographic structure with more than 6500 islands, implying high frequency of aerial transportation in the medium-run. These aspects make Japan an adequate country to invest in. At the course of this Work Project, trustworthy recommendations are provided for the current state of Abotoa and for the introduction and implementation of this Internationalization Plan. These findings strongly suggest that Skypro should indeed penetrate Japan’s market.

The financial system in Mozambique: Opportunities, barriers and market potential

This research is empirical and exploratory intending to analyse the attractiveness of banking in Mozambique, considering its positive outlook. To identify the opportunities and barriers, the methods adopted were elite interviews with banking executives, complemented by secondary data. The opportunities for new entrants seem to include bankarization and the emergence of micro and smallmedium enterprises; other avenues seem to include investment banking, support of mega-projects (e.g. energy, infrastructures) through syndicates and cooperation with multilaterals, and the participation in developing capital markets. Conversely, the main barriers include shortage of talent, inadequate infrastructures, poverty, unsophisticated entrepreneurial culture (e.g. informal economy, inadequate financial reporting), burdensome bureaucracy (e.g. visas), foreign exchange regulation, as well as low liquidity and high funding costs for banks. The key conclusions suggest a window of opportunity for niche markets, and new products and services in retail and investment banking.

Launching platforms for user-generated content

Field lab: Entrepreneurial and innovative ventures

Evolutionary dynamics of Chlamydia trachomatis genome and identification of molecular patterns of hypothetical protein coding genes

The obligate intracellular bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis is a human pathogen of major public health significance. Strains can be classified into 15 main serovars (A to L3) that preferentially cause ocular infections (A-C), genital infections (D-K) or lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV) (L1-L3), but the molecular basis behind their distinct tropism, ecological success and pathogenicity is not welldefined. Most chlamydial research demands culture in eukaryotic cell lines, but it is not known if stains become laboratory adapted. By essentially using genomics and transcriptomics, we aimed to investigate the evolutionary patterns underlying the adaptation of C. trachomatis to the different human tissues, given emphasis to the identification of molecular patterns of genes encoding hypothetical proteins, and to understand the adaptive process behind the C. trachomatis in vivo to in vitro transition. Our results highlight a positive selection-driven evolution of C. trachomatis towards nichespecific adaptation, essentially targeting host-interacting proteins, namely effectors and inclusion membrane proteins, where some of them also displayed niche-specific expression patterns. We also identified potential "ocular-specific" pseudogenes, and pointed out the major gene targets of adaptive mutations associated with LGV infections. We further observed that the in vivo-derived genetic makeup of C. trachomatis is not significantly compromised by its long-term laboratory propagation. In opposition, its introduction in vitro has the potential to affect the phenotype, likely yielding virulence attenuation. In fact, we observed a "genital-specific" rampant inactivation of the virulence gene CT135, which may impact the interpretation of data derived from studies requiring culture. Globally, the findings presented in this Ph.D. thesis contribute for the understanding of C.trachomatis adaptive evolution and provides new insights into the biological role of C. trachomatishypothetical proteins. They also launch research questions for future functional studies aiming toclarify the determinants of tissue tropism, virulence or pathogenic dissimilarities among C. trachomatisstrains.