Crystalline silicon continues to be the backbone of solar cell technologies. Enormous efforts towards process optimisation, cell architecture and defect identification, amongst others, thus continue to be made in order to push the limits of achievable efficiencies. Consequently,…
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Lewisian Genuine Realism (GR) about possible worlds is often deemed unable to accommodate impossible worlds and reap the benefits that these bestow to rival theories. This thesis explores two alternative extensions of GR into the terrain of impossible worlds. It is divided in si…
Barley (Hordeum vulgare) is an economically important crop species with a large diploid genome. Around a half of the barley genome and a fifth of the genes are constrained within a low-recombining pericentromeric (LR-PC) region. I explored the LR-PC gene component with a genomic…
This work looks at endemic cancer and death among the people of two villages in the Cappadocia region of Central Anatolia/Turkey in multiple contexts. Following the discovery of the highly carcinogenic fibrous zeolite (erionite) in the rocks and volcanic tuffs in these villages,…
One of the central goals of evolutionary biology is to understand the evolutionary relationships among organisms by constructing phylogenetic estimates, commonly known as evolutionary trees. The accuracy of phylogenetic estimates can be strongly affected by the particular evolut…
Cancer progression is an evolutionary process: somatic mutations can confer selective advantages to certain cells, eventually causing them to abnormally proliferate. Parallels can be drawn between the evolution of organismal populations and cancer cell populations. In both, sele…
Genomic diversity is shaped by the interplay between mutation, genetic drift, recombination, and natural selection. A major goal of evolutionary biology is to understand the relative contribution of these different microevolutionary forces to patterns of genetic variation both w…
Claviceps purpurea (ergot), an ascomycete and member of the family Clavicipitacea, is considered a pathogen of all grass species (family Poaecea) including economically important cereal crops which infects ovaries resulting in the development of a fungal sclerotium rather than a…
One of the most outstanding questions in fundamental physics is the nature of dark matter (DM). From multiple independent sources of evidence we infer that DM exists and constitutes nearly 85% of all matter in the universe. However, it is still not known what comprises the DM, h…
Human endogenous retrovirus type-H (HERVH) is specifically expressed in the pluripotent stem cells of the pre-implantation embryo. A subset of these elements appear to exert regulatory activities promoting pluripotency and self-renewal. How HERVH attained this specific expressio…