422 research outputs found
First person - Tiina Viita
Full text linkFirst Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Tiina Viita is first author on 'Nuclear actin interactome analysis links actin to KAT14 histone acetyl transferase and mRNA splicing', published in JCS. Tiina is a PhD Student in the lab of Maria Vartiainen at the Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki, Finland, investigating the nucleus, proteomics, chromatin remodeling, actin and post-transitional modifications of histones.Non peer reviewe
TaqMan qPCR for Quantification of Clonostachys rosea Used as a Biological Control Agent Against Fusarium graminearum
No full textClonostachys rosea is a biological control agent against Fusarium graminearum in small grain cereals and maize. Infections with F. graminearum do not only reduce the yield but, due to the production of mycotoxins, also affect the entire value chain of food and feed. In addition, production of other secondary metabolites such as hydrophobins, also known as gushing inducers, may cause quality challenges for the malting and brewing industry. Sustainable disease control strategies using C. rosea are treatment of infected residues of the previous crop, direct treatment of the actual cereal crop or post-harvest treatment during malting processes. Follow-up of growth and survival of biocontrol organisms during these different stages is of crucial importance. In the current study, we developed a quantitative real-time PCR detection method that amends the currently available culture-dependent techniques by using TaqMan chemistry with a highly specific primer and probe set, targeting the actin gene. We established a sensitive assay that detects the biological control agent down to 100 genome copies per reaction, with PCR efficiencies between 90 and 100%. The specificity of the assay was confirmed against a panel of 30 fungal and 3 bacterial species including 12 members of the Fusarium head blight complex and DNA of barley, maize and wheat. The DNA of C. rosea was detected in Fusarium-infected maize crop residues that were either treated in the laboratory or in the field with C. rosea and followed its DNA throughout the barley malting process to estimate its growth during grain germination. We used a standardized DNA extraction protocol and showed that C. rosea can be quantified in different sample matrices. This method will enable the monitoring of C. rosea during experiments studying the biological control of F. graminearum on cereal crop residues and on cereal grains and will thus contribute to the development of a new disease control strategy
Biography, Gender and History:Nordic Perspectives
No full textDoing biography / Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir, Tiina Kinnunen, Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, page 7How does one relate a complex life? Reflections on a polyphonic portrait of the minister and intellectual Bodil Koch (1903-1973) / Brigitte Possing, page 37Biography as a way of challenging gender stereotypes : reflections on writing about the Swedish author and feminist Frida Stéenhoff (1865-1945) / Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, page 61A biography of her own : the historical narrative and Sigríður Pálsdóttir (1809-1871) / Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir, page 81Group biography as an approach to studying manhood and religion in late nineteenth-century Finland / Antti Harmainen, page 101Love and emotions in the diplomatic world : the relationship between Bodil Begtrup's public and private lives, 1937-1956 / Kristine Kjærsgaard, page 121'Fighting sisters' : a comparative biography of Ellen Key (1849-1926) and Alexandra Gripenberg (1857-1913) in the contested field of European feminisms / Tiina Kinnunen, page 143Telling stories of gendered space and place : the political agency of the Swedish Communist Valborg Svensson (1903-1983) / Irene Andersson, page 165Remembering mother : relations and memory in the biographical project on Minna Krohn (1841-1917) / Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, page 187Coming together : early Finnish medical women and the multiple levels of historical biography / Heini Hakosalo, page 209Bad girl biographies : child welfare documents as gendered biographies / Kaisa Vehkalahti, page 231Afterword : future challenges / Tiina Kinnunen, Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir, Brigitte Possing, page 25
Biography, Gender and History:Nordic Perspectives
No full textDoing biography / Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir, Tiina Kinnunen, Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, page 7How does one relate a complex life? Reflections on a polyphonic portrait of the minister and intellectual Bodil Koch (1903-1973) / Brigitte Possing, page 37Biography as a way of challenging gender stereotypes : reflections on writing about the Swedish author and feminist Frida Stéenhoff (1865-1945) / Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, page 61A biography of her own : the historical narrative and Sigríður Pálsdóttir (1809-1871) / Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir, page 81Group biography as an approach to studying manhood and religion in late nineteenth-century Finland / Antti Harmainen, page 101Love and emotions in the diplomatic world : the relationship between Bodil Begtrup's public and private lives, 1937-1956 / Kristine Kjærsgaard, page 121'Fighting sisters' : a comparative biography of Ellen Key (1849-1926) and Alexandra Gripenberg (1857-1913) in the contested field of European feminisms / Tiina Kinnunen, page 143Telling stories of gendered space and place : the political agency of the Swedish Communist Valborg Svensson (1903-1983) / Irene Andersson, page 165Remembering mother : relations and memory in the biographical project on Minna Krohn (1841-1917) / Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, page 187Coming together : early Finnish medical women and the multiple levels of historical biography / Heini Hakosalo, page 209Bad girl biographies : child welfare documents as gendered biographies / Kaisa Vehkalahti, page 231Afterword : future challenges / Tiina Kinnunen, Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir, Brigitte Possing, page 25
3rd European Federation of Biotechnology Conference:Physiology of Yeasts and Filamentous Fungi PYFF3
No full textThe 3rd Conference on Physiology of Yeasts and Filamentous Fungi (PYFF3) belongs to a meeting series organised by the Microbial Physiology Section of the European Federation of Biotechnology (EFB). More than 200 participants from 32 countries around the world participate in the conference. The aim of the meeting is to bring together scientists from academic research institutes and industrial laboratories to discuss the latest achievements in research on physiology of eukaryotic microbes. Yeasts and filamentous fungi are important in a number of biotechnical processes including food processing, brewing, and production of protein products such as industrial enzymes and therapeutic proteins, and production of metabolites such as antibiotics, polymer precursors and biofuels. The current trend of using lignocellulose biomass as raw material for new products in biorefineries has made yeasts and filamentous fungi more important than before. The PYFF3 conference covers comparative analysis of the expanding genomic sequence information in yeasts and filamentous fungi, as well as the experimental systems biology approaches taken to understand the global cellular regulation cues. Bioprocess-level analysis of production processes based on yeasts and filamentous fungi is also discussed, including its correlation with the physiological knowledge obtained with systems-wide analysis. The main financial supporters of the meeting are: EFB Microbial Physiology Section, Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS) and companies using yeasts and filamentous fungi in industrial processes
Finnish women making religion: between ancestors and angels
No full text
The influence of Theosophy and Anthroposophy in Finland is approached by Tiina Mahlamäki through the writer Kersti Bergroth’s (1886–1975) life and work. Emmanuel Swedenborg’s and in particular Rudolf Steiner’s Theosophical and Anthroposophical writings strongly emphasized creativity and thus appealed to many artists, who, from this perspective, became conveyors of hidden spiritual truths. One of these artists was Bergroth, who declared that she had expressed her whole life in her writings, “but always veiled, covered, deceptive, quite different than it was ever lived.”. Despite a career lasting over more than sixty years and with more than seventy published novels, Kersti Bergroth remains nearly unknown as an author to Finnish readers of today.</p
3rd European Federation of Biotechnology Conference:Physiology of Yeasts and Filamentous Fungi PYFF3
No full textThe 3rd Conference on Physiology of Yeasts and Filamentous Fungi (PYFF3) belongs to a meeting series organised by the Microbial Physiology Section of the European Federation of Biotechnology (EFB). More than 200 participants from 32 countries around the world participate in the conference. The aim of the meeting is to bring together scientists from academic research institutes and industrial laboratories to discuss the latest achievements in research on physiology of eukaryotic microbes. Yeasts and filamentous fungi are important in a number of biotechnical processes including food processing, brewing, and production of protein products such as industrial enzymes and therapeutic proteins, and production of metabolites such as antibiotics, polymer precursors and biofuels. The current trend of using lignocellulose biomass as raw material for new products in biorefineries has made yeasts and filamentous fungi more important than before. The PYFF3 conference covers comparative analysis of the expanding genomic sequence information in yeasts and filamentous fungi, as well as the experimental systems biology approaches taken to understand the global cellular regulation cues. Bioprocess-level analysis of production processes based on yeasts and filamentous fungi is also discussed, including its correlation with the physiological knowledge obtained with systems-wide analysis. The main financial supporters of the meeting are: EFB Microbial Physiology Section, Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS) and companies using yeasts and filamentous fungi in industrial processes
Efficient production of L-lactic acid from xylose by metabolically engineered yeast <i>Pichia stipitis</i>
No full textPichia stipitis, a yeast which ferments naturally xylose, was genetically engineered for L-(+)-lactate production. A P. stipitis strain expressing the L-lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) from Lactobacillus helveticus under the control of the P. stipitis fermentative ADH1 promoter was constructed. Either xylose or glucose was used as the carbon source for lactate production under oxygen restricted conditions. Remarkably, the constructed P. stipitis strain produced a higher lactate concentration and yield on xylose than on glucose. Lactate accumulated as the main product on xylose-containing medium: 58 g/l lactate was produced from 100 g/l xylose. Relatively efficient lactate production was also observed on glucose medium, 41 g/l lactate was produced at a yield of 0.44 g/g glucose. Lactate was produced at the expense of ethanol production which was decreased to approximately 20% of the wild type levels on xylose-containing medium and to 75% on glucose-containing medium. Thus, LDH competed efficiently with the ethanol pathway for pyruvate, even though the pathway from pyruvate to ethanol was intact
Religion and atheism from a gender perspective
Full text linkTiina Mahlamäki, University of Turku
Dr and Docent Tiina Mahlamäki is Lecturer in Comparative Religion at the University of Turku, Finland. She is member of the executive board of the Finnish Society for the Study of Religion, and the co-editor-in-chief of Temenos: Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion. Her main research themes are: literature and religion, gender and religion (both religiosity and non-religiosity) and civil religion. She has recently written on Emanuel Swedenborg’s influence on Finnish national literature and on the Anthroposophical themes in the works of the Finnish female author Kersti Bergroth.In August 2010 the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE, summarising the results of the World Values 2005 survey, released them under the headline ‘Religion is a women’s issue’. Is atheism and secularity then, by contrast, an issue for men? It is tempting to answer the question positively when one looks at the names of the new atheist bestselling authors, or the names in the index lists in the back pages of books with reference to atheism, as well as the names of the researchers into atheism and secularity: they tend to be male much more often than female. In this paper I will examine the ways in which both religiosity and non-religiosity and atheism are gendered phenomena. I also look at feminists’ views on religion by pointing out in which ways they intersect with the opinions of the new atheist texts. Because both (second wave) feminists and atheists consider religion from a relatively narrow point of view, I’ll bring out the ways in which the contemporary study of religion defines, sees and studies religion and religiousness, while it takes the concept of gender seriously. I also discuss the seemingly indisputable fact which the statistics point to; namely that women tend to be more religious than men and men tend to be more often atheist than women (my examples are mostly from the Finnish context). I also present some models of explanation which scholars have applied to these problems
Cellular responses to protein production in the filamentous fungus Trichoderma reesei
No full textThe filamentous fungus Trichoderma reesei is known as an efficient producer of a variety of extracellular enzymes, the major products being cellulases and hemicellulases e.g. cellobiohydrolases, endoglucanases, Beta-glucosidases, xylanases, and hemicellulose side-chain cleaving enzymes. Altogether, analysis of the genome sequence has revealed over 200 genes classified in glycoside hydrolase gene families. T. reesei has potential to produce extracellular proteins in very large quantities, and it has been used as an industrial host organism for production of both the fungal enzymes as well as for heterologous proteins. Production of secreted proteins in large quantities or production of the heterologous proteins originating from distantly related organisms challenge the capability of the cells to fold and transport the proteins, and are known to provoke stress responses in the cell. Impaired protein folding in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) activates the unfolded protein response pathway (UPR) which result in induction of a number of genes involved e.g. in folding, glycosylation and transport. The fungal cells have also a feed-back mechanism to reduce the load in the secretory pathway by negative transcriptional regulation of genes encoding the major secreted proteins. The availability of the genome sequence information has made it possible to apply genome-wide approaches in studies of the cellular responses to protein production under different conditions. Specifically, we have compared the effects of production of two different heterologous proteins, human tPA and Melanocarpus albomyces laccase, in T. reesei using proteome and transcriptome data. The analysis showed a clear difference between the responses induced by the proteins, the main difference being in the induction of the UPR pathway. Furthermore, in order to obtain information on protein production at different physiological conditions we have carried out transcriptome and proteome analysis of carbon-limited chemostat cultures of T. reesei under different conditions, e.g. at different specific growth rates and cell density
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