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Wheat was one of the first cereals to be domesticated and it is now produced on over 700 million hectares globally, making it the most widely grown crop worldwide. This is attributable to its wide adaptability across climate and elevation ranges, as well as its central contribution to human diets. The energy-rich grain is also the major vegetable protein source in human diets and, alongside maize and rice, the cereal staples underpin food and nutrition security. Importantly, wheat grain can be stored and processed into a diverse range of end products. The versatility of wheat as both a field crop and as a grain commodity make it unique. There are many strands of knowledge, research, and breeding that have contributed to the wheat that is grown around the world today. Many features are covered in this book, including the major facets of wheat production (soils, water, temperature, sunshine), the optimal characteristics and management of the canopy to deliver harvestable outputs, and the wheat grain itself. A wealth of information describes the structure, development, and composition and quality for processing and health of wheat grain, all vital for its versatility as a food and feedstuff. Finally, the genetic improvement of wheat continues apace. Much recent innovation has uncovered previously intractable aspects of the wheat genome and we see accelerated progress in understanding genetic improvement. This expertly assembled book brings together a wealth of knowledge on wheat production and processing along with the exciting prospects of modern wheat breeding methods. The increasing global population and climate change threats necessitate our use of the synthesis of this information in continuing to breed and produce the wheat of the future.

We are concerned with a special form of the (stochastic) Allen-Cahn equation, which can be seen as a model of hybrid zones in population genetics. Individuals in the population can be of one of three types; $aa$ are fitter than $AA$, and both are fitter than the $aA$ heterozygotes. The hybrid zone is the region separating a subpopulation consisting entirely of $aa$ individuals from one consisting of $AA$ individuals. We investigate the interplay between the motion of the hybrid zone and the shape of the habitat, both with and without genetic drift (corresponding to stochastic and deterministic models respectively). In the deterministic model, we investigate the effect of a wide opening and provide some explicit sufficient conditions under which the spread of the advantageous type is halted, and complementary conditions under which it sweeps through the whole population. As a standing example, we are interested in the outcome of the advantageous population passing through an isthmus. We also identify rather precise conditions under which genetic drift breaks down the structure of the hybrid zone, complementing previous work that identified conditions on the strength of genetic drift under which the structure of the hybrid zone is preserved. Our results demonstrate that, even in cylindrical domains, it can be misleading to caricature allele frequencies by one-dimensional travelling waves, and that the strength of genetic drift plays an important role in determining the fate of a favoured allele., 57 pages, 19 figures

We investigate the long term behaviour of two models for the spatial distribution of alleles in a diploid population, one with asymmetric selection in favour of the homozygotes, and one with selection in favour of the heterozygote. We model the population with asymmetric homozygous selection using a version of the spatial Λ-Fleming-Viot process. We identify three regimes. For very small values of the asymmetry, the limiting behaviour of the process is the same as for the case with symmetric selection. This case was studied in Etheridge, Freeman and Penington (2017), and they showed, under certain rescaling and initial conditions, that the hybrid zone, the interface between two homogeneous regions of each homozygote, evolves according to mean curvature flow. However, for larger, but not that much larger, values of asymmetry, we show a new behaviour, that the hybrid zone evolves according to a different type of flow, which we call constant curvature flow. Furthermore, there is a strength of asymmetry for which elements of both types of curvature flow are present in the limit. This suggests that the behaviour found in Etheridge, Freeman and Penington (2017) is more sensitive to perturbations than first thought. We then go on to investigate the fluctuations of this process about its limit. To do this, we specialise to the one-dimensional case. We show that, when time, space and the strength of the asymmetry are appropriately rescaled, the hybrid zone, which is a single point in one dimension, evolves according to a Brownian motion, with drift proportional to the asymmetry. Finally, we turn to the model with heterozygous selection. We restrict ourselves to two dimensions, and investigate this process through its dual, the branching annihilating random walk. We show that, up to an arbitrary time, and with arbitrarily high probability, there exists a branching rate such that we may couple a branching annihilating random walk to a ternary branching Brownian motion. While interesting in its own right, this result lends support to a conjecture of Blath, Etheridge and Meredith (2007), that a branching annihilating random walk in two dimensions has a positive probability of survival for all time for any positive branching rate.

Stereotactic Ablative Radiotherapy (SABR) and percutaneous microwave ablation (PMWA) are now being performed in patients deemed “medically inoperable” with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The majority of these patients are treated without ground truth histology, relying on imaging to establish the diagnosis. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether there were differences in the visible imaging features including CT Texture Analysis (CTTA) between patients referred for surgery, SABR and PMWA, which might suggest differences in underlying diagnosis.

The BTS Pulmonary Nodule Guidelines recommend the use of nodule volumetry as a biomarker of malignancy in pulmonary nodules (PNs). However, studies have shown that there is significant inter-scan variability of such volume measurements, which can vary by up to 25% (Gietema et al 2007). CT Texture analysis (CTTA) has also been shown to be a potential imaging biomarker of malignancy but requires further validation.

Factorial pot experiments were conducted to compare the responses of GA-sensitive and GA-insensitive reduced height (Rht) alleles in wheat for susceptibility to heat and drought stress during booting and anthesis. Grain set (grains/spikelet) of near isogenic lines (NILs) was assessed following three day transfers to controlled environments imposing day temperatures (t) from 20 to 40°C. Transfers were during booting and/or anthesis and pots maintained at field capacity (FC) or had water withheld. Logistic responses (y = c/1+e-b(t -m)) described declining grain set with increasing t, and t5 was that fitted to give a 5% reduction in grain set. Averaged over NIL, t5 for anthesis at FC was 31.7±0.47°C (S.E.M, 26 d.f.). Drought at anthesis reduced t5 by