In this article, manifestations of social disadvantage in peripheral rural settings in the Czech Republic are investigated. Based on the theory of local opportunity structures, the authors identify various aspects of the spatial context that intersect with individual handicaps of people and their households and contribute to poverty and social exclusion. Moreover, coping strategies of vulnerable rural inhabitants are investigated. The empirical analysis is based on qualitative interviews with people affected by various forms of disadvantage, living in three economically weak rural regions. Multiple intersections between individual and contextual factors of disadvantage were uncovered. Limited job opportunities and precarious labour conditions within the local labour market, and the absence and difficult accessibility of services, represent the most important restrictions. Households living in poverty, the unemployed, people with care duties and persons with disabilities have very limited possibilities of overcoming the restrictions of a meager local opportunity structure. Their main problem is their low spatial mobility and temporal flexibility. The result is multiplication of individual vulnerabilities in rural localities. Two types of coping strategies, locality-based and mobility-based, have been identified as partial compensation of the existing deficits.

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This article presents the preliminary results of an ethnographic study focusing on eighth-and ninth-year students at two basic schools in Prague. The study conceives academic success and failure as categories that need to be explained; it is necessary to demonstrate how they are produced and ascribed with meaning in the everyday practice of student evaluation, especially by school authorities. Student evaluations are generally based on a complex assessment of a student's aptitude and diligence, and they also refl ect a student's conduct at school conduct and attitude towards school discipline, education, and authority, i.e. towards accepted values, the school code, and other (written and unwritten) rules of interaction. Academic failure signalling some kind of shortcoming on the part of the recipient of an evaluation -be it a lack of interest, motivation, cooperation, effort, ability, or intelligence -has a moral connotation and stigmatising effect. This is legitimised by the presumption that it is the student's own deliberate actions, his or her degree of interest and effort, that determine success or failure at school, and that this essentially has nothing to do with the student's (natural) intelligence or (given) family background. Yet a student's family background and available cultural resources play an important role in academic performance. Academically inclined parents, high academic ambitions on the part of a student and his or her parents, communication style, and respect for school authority are key elements of success at basic school and have a hand in the intergenerational reproduction of educational inequalities.

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Killer toxin K1 of Saccharomyces cerevisiae kills sensitive cells of the same species by disturbing the ion gradient across the plasma membrane after binding to the receptor at cell wall beta-1,6-glucan. Killer protein K2 is assumed to act by a similar mechanism. To identify the putative plasma membrane receptors for both toxins we mutagenized three sensitive S. cerevisiae strains and searched for clones with killer-resistant spheroplasts. The well diffusion assay identified three phenotypically different groups of clones: clones resistant simultaneously to both toxins, clones with lowered sensitivity to only K1 toxin and those with strongly lowered sensitivity to K2 and partially lowered sensitivity to K1 toxin. These phenotypes are controlled by recessive mutations that belong to at least four different complementation groups. This indicates certain differences at the level of interaction of K1 and K2 toxin with sensitive cells.