RESUMO
The paper examined the factors influencing farmer's willingness to adopt GI (geographical indication) practices in the Indonesian coffee sector from a psycho behavioral perspective. Specifically, the paper examined the psychological factors influencing the willingness of farmers to adopt GI. The study combined (1) the Planned Behavior (TPB) theory and (2) Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as the theoretical framework. The following psycho behavioral factors were constructed and tested: subjective norm (SN), perceived behavioral control (PBC), attitudes toward behavior (ATB), perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived economic benefit (PEB). The study also investigated the effects of sociodemographic factors on these psycho behavioral constructs. The survey was conducted in two geographical indication coffee territories in Indonesia that involved 178 farmers who are perceived as willing to adopt GI practices and procedures. The relationship between constructs was investigated in which structural equation modeling (SEM) was used. The obtain data were analyzed using WarpPLS 7.0. The study finds that attitude toward behavior, perceived behavioral control, and perceived economic benefit, as important factors influencing the willingness to adopt GI practices. The subjective norm did not affect willingness to adopt GI practices. Farmers' knowledge mainly affected perceived behavioral control and willingness to adopt GI practices and procedures.
RESUMO
The advent of deep-sequencing techniques has revealed that mutations in G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) signaling pathways in cancer are more prominent than was previously appreciated. An emergent theme is that cancer-associated mutations tend to cause enhanced GPCR pathway activation to favor oncogenicity. Regulators of G protein signaling (RGS) proteins are critical modulators of GPCR signaling that dampen the activity of heterotrimeric G proteins through their GTPase-accelerating protein (GAP) activity, which is conferred by a conserved domain dubbed the "RGS-box." Here, we developed an experimental pipeline to systematically assess the mutational landscape of RGS GAPs in cancer. A pan-cancer bioinformatics analysis of the 20 RGS domains with GAP activity revealed hundreds of low-frequency mutations spread throughout the conserved RGS domain structure with a slight enrichment at positions that interface with G proteins. We empirically tested multiple mutations representing all RGS GAP subfamilies and sampling both G protein interface and noninterface positions with a scalable, yeast-based assay. Last, a subset of mutants was validated using G protein activity biosensors in mammalian cells. Our findings reveal that a sizable fraction of RGS protein mutations leads to a loss of function through various mechanisms, including disruption of the G protein-binding interface, loss of protein stability, or allosteric effects on G protein coupling. Moreover, our results also validate a scalable pipeline for the rapid characterization of cancer-associated mutations in RGS proteins.
