Anticoagulant rodenticides have been used for control of rodents (principally rats and mice in the UK) for over 50 years. UK and European legislation requires that manufacturers of poison baits provide efficacy data, including how many rodents are killed by a new bait formulation. As a consequence a small number of procedures are carried out in the UK every year which necessitate allowing animals to die from anticoagulant poisoning. There is a lag-time, of 4-6 days, from ingestion of bait to death associated with all anticoagulant rodenticides. This project aims to identify behavioural or biochemical markers during that lag-time that can be used to predict death or survival and allow humane methods to be used for ending the experiment before the animals die.

This project will fund a fellowship placement for a mid-career researcher to work for 9 months with the better regulation teams at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Environment Agency (EA). 'Better Regulation' is the UK government's approach to developing regulation that achieves the desired outcome while avoiding unintended consequences and limiting costs for companies, consumers and the taxpayer. For Defra and the EA, the challenge is to improve, simplify, consolidate and even remove environmental regulations, while achieving at least equivalent outcomes for the environment, society and the economy. Academic research can offer useful guidance on how to tackle this challenge through providing evidence on the impacts, costs and benefits of various approaches to environmental regulation. The project will enable a researcher who specialises in company responses to environmental regulation to provide their expertise to Defra and the EA. During the fellowship the researcher will (1) collate research evidence on the relationships between environmental regulation, innovation, firm performance and economic growth, and (2) consult these and other government agencies to develop an action plan for future research collaboration on better regulation for a sustainable economy.

The predominant activity in risk assessment is the modelling of physical hazards. Yet recent major risk events, such as the Sudan 1 food contamination scandal, show how important the social response can be in comparison to physical harm. Withdrawals of product, loss of reputation, reductions in trust, additional testing and inspection regimes, and so on can often be just as consequential as physical injury. Our main basis for understanding the social response to risk events is the Social Amplification of Risk Framework due to Kasperson et al (1988). But this remains a qualitative model, and is accepted even by its authors (for example Kasperson et al 2003) as a 'framework' for organising our general understanding rather than a theory that will predict or explain the social construction of risk in a definite way.Our aim is to determine whether, and investigate how, we can make the concepts which appear in social risk amplification models more precise and more quantitative. To do this we propose to explore a variety of techniques used in the discipline of epidemiology - on the basis of a number of apparent parallels. For example, notions of susceptibility and infection seem to be analogous to notions of sensitivity and concern, 'super-infectives' resemble certain social institutions such as the broadcast media, and the recrudescence of infection resembles the recrudescence of concern and 'ripple effects' found in risk amplification. The programme will involve applying a number of techniques to the various kinds of data we have about social response (for example the uptake of vaccinations), in the context of several recent case studies. We plan to assess how informative these are in the decision processes of our collaborator - the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs.

The predominant activity in risk assessment is the modelling of physical hazards. Yet recent major risk events, such as the Sudan 1 food contamination scandal, show how important the social response can be in comparison to physical harm. Withdrawals of product, loss of reputation, reductions in trust, additional testing and inspection regimes, and so on can often be just as consequential as physical injury. Our main basis for understanding the social response to risk events is the Social Amplification of Risk Framework due to Kasperson et al (1988). But this remains a qualitative model, and is accepted even by its authors (for example Kasperson et al 2003) as a 'framework' for organising our general understanding rather than a theory that will predict or explain the social construction of risk in a definite way.Our aim is to determine whether, and investigate how, we can make the concepts which appear in social risk amplification models more precise and more quantitative. To do this we propose to explore a variety of techniques used in the discipline of epidemiology - on the basis of a number of apparent parallels. For example, notions of susceptibility and infection seem to be analogous to notions of sensitivity and concern, 'super-infectives' resemble certain social institutions such as the broadcast media, and the recrudescence of infection resembles the recrudescence of concern and 'ripple effects' found in risk amplification. The programme will involve applying a number of techniques to the various kinds of data we have about social response (for example the uptake of vaccinations), in the context of several recent case studies. We plan to assess how informative these are in the decision processes of our collaborator - the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs.

Oats are a valuable break crop in cereal rotations, a lower input crop than wheat, perform well in marginal areas and are a high value feed that grows well in grassland based rotations. Nevertheless there is a need to improve key traits that will increase the production and utilisation of oats whilst also mitigating climate and environmental change via reduced agricultural inputs. Research also needs to anticipate changes in the market as consumers shift towards healthier diets of which oats are a key component. Discussions with end-user groups from the milling and livestock sectors, as well as processors, all key partners in this project, have identified the priority areas where genetic improvement can make quantifiable improvements to the oat crop. Various approaches to marker discovery have been tested and high density oat maps have been established however it has become clear that there is relatively little polymorphism in cultivated oats and therefore an urgent need to maximise the use of available polymorphism and be able to select precisely for novel polymorphisms from non-UK adapted germplasm if it is to be used effectively by plant breeders. This project will address these issues by developing and applying state-of-the-art genomic and metabolomic tools for targeted oat genetic improvement. The focus is on the understanding and manipulation of key traits that will enhance the value of oats in human health improvement, realise the potential of oats as a high value animal feed and develop new opportunities for using oats through advanced fractionation. In so doing it will also increase the environmental and economic sustainability of cereal based rotations and capitalise on the value of oats as a low input cereal. Powerful enabling technologies for the identification of specific genes and markers will drive the development of breeder -friendly tools accelerating the production of improved oat varieties that will be marketed by industrial partners. This is a multi-disciplinary project which combines modern phenotyping methodologies with the expertise of genomics researchers, oat breeders and end-users, which will also address long term breeding goals by developing experimental populations which are polymorphic for agronomically important traits but more amenable to mapping and forward genetic approaches than conventional agronomic lines. Involvement of the various end-users of oats (food, feed and industrial uses) in the evaluation of novel oat lines will facilitate the transfer of this research into oat breeding programmes and deliver oat varieties with the characteristics that industry requires and deliver environmental benefits to sustainable production systems.