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The overall interest of this thesis is to contribute with knowledge about meaning making processes in educational encounters with nature in different educational practices. The exploration consists of four studies based on a pragmatic perspective on meaning making inspired by the works of John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein. A discourse analytical approach is also used in the first study to analyse the curriculum documents. The result confirms that encounters with nature have a clear position in the curriculum documents, and friluftsliv is a prioritised content in PETE. It is further confirmed that the field of outdoor education is a field of conflicting meanings that pose significant educational challenges. Indeterminate situations occur and may influence students’ possibilities to transform the educational content in PETE to a school context. Another conclusion from the results is that instrumental meanings and a sportification of friluftsliv often get precedence over more emotional based meanings connected to nature. The results also show empirical examples where encounters with nature enable participants to create moral relations towards nature. This potential is highlighted in previous research as one of the most important in order to (re)connect our relation towards nature and in extension better conditions to deal with environmental questions.

In this presentation we explore the content of friluftsliv in physical ed-ucation teacher education (PETE). Friluftsliv is a quite unique cultural tradition with a long and deeply rooted history in the Scandinavian countries, characterised by in-formal living outdoors with ‘nature as home’. At the same time, a more institutional-ised form of friluftsliv occurs as a subject content in schools and an explicit key learning area in physical education (PE) as in for example Norway or Sweden much in the same way that outdoor education is in several other countries. In sum, the unique characteristics of friluftsliv as a cultural tradition entails specific educational challenges when incorporated into school PE. Here, PETE plays an important part in preparing future teachers to educate in matters pertaining to friluftsliv. Hence, the purpose of the study is to contribute with knowledge on educational challenges with the use of friluftsliv in PETE practice. In the study, we focus on events where mean-ings of friluftsliv in PETE are in conflict. The empirical material consists of diverse materials from activities in friluftsliv in PETE programmes: study guides, field trip plans, students’ vlogs from overnight stays outdoors, video recordings from two longer field trips, audio recordings from evening seminars during one field trip, and students’ written reflections afterwards. First, we identified situations where mean-ings of friluftsliv are at stake. In the analyses we identified and described educational challenges using a transactional approach. In the results we have provided addi-tional evidence that friluftsliv in PETE is a practice where different meanings are put into play. These meanings are often conflicting. These conflicts, in turn, creates sig-nificant educational challenges for teacher educators, but also for the students in PETE. Illustrative examples from two general challenges will be presented, where meanings of friluftsliv are put into play; (i) Participant

The aim with this article is to contribute knowledge about the meanings of friluftsliv in educational practice. This is done by investigating what friluftsliv becomes in the ongoing practices of PETE in Sweden and how these meanings are established in the studied activities. The empirical material consists of different kinds of material from friluftsliv activities in PETE programmes: study guides, field trip plans, students’ vlogs from overnight stays outdoors, video recordings from two longer field trips, audio recordings from evening seminars during the field trips and students’ written reflections after them. In order to identify meanings of friluftsliv and how these are established we used a transactional analysis based on Dewey. Five different ways of what friluftsliv becomes in PETE practice were identified in this study. The different meanings reflect the complex picture of contradictions and lack of common ground for the content and motives identified in the outdoor education field. Our study also confirms how the meaning of friluftsliv as skills is established by putting up tents, lighting fires, building wind shelters and so on, and how this contributes to a focus on the instrumental values in PETE. On the other hand, our study shows that other meanings of friluftsliv are established in the ongoing practice, where more intrinsic values are at stake even if they are often overshadowed in PETE practice. In conclusion the results also point to the potential of fritluftsliv in terms of a suggested move away from an activity-based personal and social development discourse in favour of experiences of educating for environmentally sustainable human-nature relations. The challenge is how to make these experiences educational in PETE and how to guide students in transforming experiences in more exclusive friluftsliv into pedagogical competence as future teachers using friluftsliv for different purposes in school PE.

A multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) assay was developed for precise quantitation of 87 plasma proteins including the three isoforms of apolipoprotein E (APOE) associated with cardiovascular diseases using nanoscale liquid chromatography separation and stable isotope dilution strategy. The analytical performance of the assay was evaluated and we found an average technical variation of 4.7% in 4-5 orders of magnitude dynamic range (approximate to 0.2 mg/L to 4.5 g/L) from whole plasma digest. Here, we report a complete workflow, including sample processing adapted to 96-well plate format and normalization strategy for large-scale studies. To further investigate the MS-based quantitation the amount of six selected proteins was measured by routinely used clinical chemistry assays as well and the two methods showed excellent correlation with high significance (p-value < 10e-5) for the six proteins, in addition for the cardiovascular predictor factor, APOB: APOA1 ratio (r = 0.969, p-value < 10e-5). Moreover, we utilized the developed assay for screening of biobank samples from patients with myocardial infarction and performed the comparative analysis of patient groups with STEMI (ST- segment elevation myocardial infarction), NSTEMI (non ST- segment elevation myocardial infarction) and type-2 AMI (type-2 myocardial infarction) patients.

Prostate specific antigen (PSA) is a well-established tumor marker, which is frequently employed as model biomarker to develop and evaluate emerging quantitative proteomics techniques, partially due to wide access to commercialized immunoassays serving as "gold standard". We designed a multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) assay to detect PSA proteoforms in clinical samples (n=72), utilizing specificity and sensitivity of the method. We report for the first time, a PSA proteoform, coded by SNP-L132I (rs2003783), observed in 9 samples in both heterozygous (n=7) and homozygous (n=2) expression profiles. Other isoforms of PSA, derived from protein databases, were not identified by four unique proteotypic tryptic peptides. We have also utilized our MRM assay for precise quantitative analysis of PSA concentrations in both seminal and blood plasma samples. The analytical performance was evaluated, providing close agreement between each quantitation based on three selected peptides (LSEPAELTDAVK, IVGGWECEK and SVILLGR) and a routinely used commercialized immunoassay. Additionally, we have disclosed that the peptide IVGGWECEK is shared with kallikrein-related peptidase 2 and therefore not unique for PSA. Hence, we propose to use another tryptic sequence (SVILLGR) for accurate MRM-quantification of PSA in clinical samples.