Characterization of a Lytic Polysaccharide Monooxygenase from Schizophyllum commune belonging to Auxiliary Activity Family 9

Biomass is a promising feedstock to reduce our dependence on fossil reserves. By using biomass, such as lignocellulose, products can be produced more climate-friendly and are therefore of large industrial interest. Biomass is also renewable, in contrast to fossil reserves, like oil and coal. However, the downside of biomass is that lignocellulose and other polysaccharides can be a challenge to degrade because of their crystalized and insoluble structure. Previously, hydrolytic enzymes were thought to be the only enzymes degrading polysaccharides. However, in 2010, a new paradigm was born, when researchers first described a protein that degraded chitin through oxidative cleavage. Subsequently, the enzymes have been characterized as lytic polysaccharide monooxygenases (LPMOs), and they do not only work on chitin, but also on cellulose and other recalcitrant polysaccharides. The discovery of LPMOs was a big step in the direction toward more efficient degradation of recalcitrant polysaccharides. LPMOs act on parts of the substrate that hydrolytic enzymes cannot properly degrade, thus making recalcitrant polysaccharides more available for traditional hydrolases by creating free chain ends. LPMOs are oxidative mono-copper enzymes that can oxidatively cleave glycosidic bonds in polysaccharides. To complete a catalytic cycle, the active site copper Cu(II) must be reduced to Cu(I), and the LPMOs require a dioxygen co-substrate, either O2 or H2O2. Since LPMOs show variation in their ability to attack various forms of cellulose, it is important for the industry to have a wide spectrum of LPMOs to use on different substrates. Therefore, ScLPMO9A from Schizophyllum commune, which is one of several LPMOs that have not been completely characterized yet, was studied, and compared with NcLPMO9C from Neurospora crassa for this thesis. ScLPMO9A and NcLPMO9C are both exclusively C4 oxidizing LPMOs, acting on soluble substrates. Results from this study show, for example, that ScLPMO9A depolymerises various forms of cellulose and hemicelluloses and that the substrate specificity and product formation differ from NcLPMO9C. For example, ScLPMO9A is active on xyloglucan, glucomannan and soluble cello-oligosaccharides, but not active on more crystalline forms of cellulose, like Avicel, while NcLPMO9C is active on more crystalline forms of cellulose. In addition, they also show that the reaction rate is increased by adding H2O2 to the reactions for both ScLPMO9A and NcLPMO9C. The results from this thesis give important information about the biochemistry of ScLPMO9A, that can be used for further studies.Biomasse er en lovende råvare for å redusere bruken av fossile energikilder. Ved å bruke biomasse, som for eksempel lignocellulose, kan produkter bli produsert mer klimavennlig, og derfor er biomasse en stor interesse for industrien. I tillegg til dette er biomasse fornybart, i motsetning til fossile energikilder som olje og kull. Den største ulempen ved å bruke biomasse i industrien at det kan være en utfordring å bryte den ned, da polysakkarider som lignocellulose er krystalliserte og uløselige, men det kommer stadig bedre løsninger for dette. Før trodde man at hydrolytiske enzymer var de eneste enzymene som brøt ned polysakkarider. I 2010 startet derimot et nytt paradigme i enzymatisk degradering, da forskere fant et enzym som katalyserer nedbrytingen av kitin. Senere er det funnet flere enzymer med samme mekanisme, som i dag er klassifisert som lytisk polysakkarid monooksygenaser (LPMOer). Disse enzymene bryter ikke bare ned kitin, men også cellulose og andre polysakkarider. Funnet av disse enzymene har gjort nedbrytningen av polysakkarider mer effektiv, siden LPMOer kan bryte ned deler av substratet som hydrolytiske enzymer ikke kan bryte ned. Dette fører til at polysakkaridet blir mer tilgjengelige for tradisjonelle hydrolaser ved at det er dannet frie kjedeender. LPMOer er oksidative mono-kobber enzymer som kan katalysere brytingen av glykosid bindinger i polysakkarider. For å fullføre en katalytisk syklus, må kobberet i det aktive setet Cu(II) bli redusert til Cu(I). I tillegg krever LPMOet et di-oksygen co-substrat, enten fra O2 eller fra H2O2. Siden LPMOer fungerer på ulike substrater er det viktig for industrien å ha et vidt spekter av LPMOer som kan brukes på ulike substrater. Derfor ble ScLPMO9A fra Schizophyllum commune, som er et av flere LPMOer som ikke er komplett karakterisert enda, studert og sammenlignet med NcLPMO9C fra Neurospora crassa for denne oppgaven. ScLPMO9A og NcLPMO9C er begge C4 oksiderende LPMOer som kan bryte ned løselige substrater. Resultater fra dette studiet viser for eksempel at ScLPMO9A bryter ned ulike cellulose- og hemicellulose-substrater og at substratspesifisiteten og produktdannelsen er forskjellig fra NcLPMO9C. For eksempel er ScLPMO9A aktivt på xyloglukan, glukomannan, og løselige cello-oligosakkarider, mens det ikke er aktivt på mer krystalliserte former av cellulose som Avicel. NcLPMO9C er derimot også aktiv på de mer krystalliserte formene av cellulose. I tillegg vises det at begge enzymene reagerer raskere ved å tilsette hydrogenperoksid. Disse resultatene gir informasjon om biokjemien til ScLPMO9A som kan brukes i videre studier.M-BIOTE

Mot en standardisering av voksenhet? : barn som redskap i statens disiplinering av voksne

På tross av økt individualisering i samfunnet oppfattes fremdeles barn og voksne, i det sosiokulturelle rommet, som relasjonelle kategorier som er gjensidig avhengige av hverandre. Denne typen gjensidig avhengighet og påvirkning innebærer at den ene kategorien kan styres gjennom den andre. Artikkelen tar utgangspunkt i Foucaults analyse av moderne styring, og diskuterer hvordan forståelser av barn fører til subtil kontroll og styring av voksnes liv gjennom velferdsprofesjoners praksiser. Den diskuterer hvor undertykkende velferdsstaters bruk av vitenskapelig kunnskap kan være og spør om samfunnet er i ferd med å utvikle standardiserte barn og standardiserte voksne ved at den normsettende kunnskapen om barn speiler den hvite middelklassens verdier og livsbetingelser uten at dette italesettes. Et siste spørsmål handler om hvordan det økende fokuset på barns rettigheter spiller inn i slike prosesser.Despite an increased individualization in society children and adults are still perceived as relational categories mutually dependent on each other. This mutual dependency and influence opens for the possibility to rule one category through the other. The article takes as its starting point Foucault’s analysis of modern government and discusses how understandings of children lead to a subtle control and rule of adults through the practices of welfare professions. It questions welfare states’ oppressive use of knowledge in order to legitimate itself and asks if society is about to develop standardized children and standardized adults based upon knowledge about children that mirror middle-class values and life circumstances. The article also discusses the significance of the increased focus on children’s rights – to be seen and heard – for such processes

The Meaning of the Term “Holistic” in the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program

This thesis researches what the term “holistic” means in the Middle Years Program (MYP) curriculum framework (IB 2014) from the International Baccalaureate Organization (IB). It compares the MYP curriculum with principles of holistic education defined by authors (J. P. Miller 2007, pp 6-15; Rudge 2008, pp 21-22) in the field. The purpose of this research is to gain knowledge and insight from different perspectives on holistic education. The methodology is based on philosophical hermeneutics (Alvesson & Sköldberg 2009, p 91), with document analysis (Bryman 2016, p 581-583) as the method for data collection. Coding and subtraction of data are done in a deductive way (Braun and Clarke 2006, p 83-84) with a pre-existing coding frame based on principles of holistic education (J. P. Miller 2007, pp 6- 15). This study only concerns statements in a document (curriculum framework), and does not analyze implementation and practice. The findings show some similarities between the principles of holistic education (Miller 2007, pp 6-15; Rudge 2008, pp 21-22) and the MYP curriculum, but there are also differences. One main finding is a similar concern for the education of the whole child (IB 2014, p 9; Miller 2007, p 11), focusing not only on intellectual development and academic achievement but also on students’ social, emotional, and physical wellbeing. Another main finding is similarities in focus on the relationship between the child and its community. The focus on developing international-mindedness to promote intercultural understanding, respect, and care for others is present in the MYP program (IB 2014, p 12). That is similar to the principle of interconnectedness (Rudge 2008, p 14-15) and the importance placed on the relationship between the individual and community (Miller 2007, pp. 13-14) in holistic education. One important principle of holistic education, the aspect of spirituality (Rudge 2008, p 25; Miller 2007, p 4), is less focused on in the MYP curriculum. Here the thesis’s findings suggest that IB is not in line with holistic education principles. The thesis discusses the main findings and includes a smaller discussion around teaching human rights and democracy in the MYP curriculum. Social change and democracy, including human rights, are important aspects of holistic education (Rudge 2008, p 22; Miller 2007, p 67), but seems less directly outspoken in the MYP curriculum. The thesis concludes that there in some areas are significant similarities between holistic education principles and the MYP curriculum, but significant differences in other areas. I interpret the meaning of the word “holistic” in the MYP curriculum to be a concern for the education of the whole child and for the child’s relationship to its community

The Texture of Everyday Life: Carceral Realism and Abolitionist Speculation

Exploring the ways in which prisons shape the subjectivity of free-world thinkers, and the ways that subjectivity is expressed in literary texts, this dissertation develops the concept of carceral realism: a cognitive and literary mode that represents prisons and police as the only possible response to social disorder. As this dissertation illustrates, this form of consciousness is experienced as racial paranoia, and it is expressed literary texts, which reflect and help to reify it. Through this process of cultural reification, carceral realism increasingly insists on itself as the only possible mode of thinking. As I argue, however, carceral realism actually stands in a dialectical relationship to abolitionist speculation, or, the active imagining of a world without prisons and police and/or the conditions necessary to actualize such a world. In much the same way that carceral realism embeds itself in realist literary forms, abolitionist speculation plays a constitutive role in the utopian literary tradition. In order to elaborate these concepts, this dissertation begins with a meta-consideration of how cultural productions by incarcerated people are typically framed. Building upon the work of scholars and incarcerated authors’ own interventions in questions of consciousness, authorship, textual production, and study, this chapter contrasts that typical frame with a method of abolitionist reading. Chapter two applies this methodology to Edward Bunker’s 1977 novel The Animal Factory and Claudia Rankine’s 2010 poem Citizen in order to develop the concept of carceral realism and demonstrate how it has developed from the 1970s to the present. In order to lay out the historical foundations of the modern prison, chapter three looks back to the late 18th century and situates the emergence of the penitentiary within debates regarding race, citizenship, and state power. Returning to the 1970s, chapter four investigates the role universities have played in the formation of carceral realism and the complex relationship Chicanos and Asian Americans have to prisons and police by analogizing the institutionalization of prison literary study to the formation of ethnic studies. Chapter five draws this project to a conclusion by developing the concept of abolitionist speculation, or the active imagining of a world without prisons or the police and/or the conditions necessary to realize such a world, which I identify as both a constitutive generic feature of utopian literature and something that exceeds literature altogether. In doing so, this dissertation establishes an ongoing historical relationship between social reproduction of prisons and literary forms that cuts across time, geography, race, gender, and genre

Children's confidences, parents' confessions : child welfare dialogues as technologies of control

The article presents findings from a detailed examination of dialogical sequences recorded in written documents from Norwegian child welfare services. Using a frame drawn from Foucault’s theory of technologies of control, it describes how con- versations between the social workers and parents function as disciplining tools. By emphasizing children’s rights under Norwegian law and scientific based knowledge about children, the social workers regulate the parents’ life towards what is culturally considered as proper parenting in Norway. In doing so, they assign the children and the parents different subject positions in the dialogues. I will argue that the children become subjects through what is perceived as the sharing of confidences, while the parents become subjects through confessions and admissions

Developing Child-Centered Social Policies: When Professionalism Takes Over

No nation today can be understood as being fully child-centered, but many are pursuing social policies heavily favoring children. The emphasis on individual rights and the growth of scientific knowledge underpinning many of these policies have led to the improvement of the lives of a great many children. Paradoxically, these same knowledge bases informing social policies often produce representations and images of children and their parents that are detrimental for both of these groups. Using Norwegian child welfare policies and practices as examples, I will examine some of the possible pitfalls of child-centered praxis. The key question here is one asking whether the scientific frame central to child welfare professionalism has positioned children and parents as objects rather than subjects in their own lives and, in so doing, required them to live up to standards of life defined for them by experts. A central question will involve exploring the extent to which scientific knowledge has erased political and ethical considerations from the field when assessing social problems

Proteomic analysis of neonatal meningitis-causing Escherichia coli

Meningitis in newborns is a serious infection that causes mortality and neurological injury worldwide. The infection progresses from sepsis, and is dependent on the pathogen being able to cross the blood-brain barrier and invade the spinal fluid. One of the most common gram-negative organisms to cause neonatal meningitis is Escherichia coli. In this work, neonatal meningitis-causing E. coli strains H622 and IHE3034 were grown in clinical blood cultures alongside commensal E. coli K12 derivative J53. The bacteria were purified, lysed, and digested with proteases, before being analysed using mass spectrometry. The mass spectrometry results were quantified in order to create quantitative protein profiles of each bacterium. By using statistical and computational analysis, we compared the strains and identified proteins that were differentially expressed between the pathogenic strains and J53. The results indicate that the pathogenic strains share a number of regulatory mechanism, and demonstrate a higher expression than J53 of virulence factors, motility proteins, and proteins involved in capsule synthesis. In addition to the mass spectrometric analysis, the bacteria were characterised using genetic and phenotypic methods. The results indicate that the pathogenic strains H622 and IHE3034 share a closer evolutionary relationship than either does with J53. The mass spectrometry raw files have been deposited to the ProteomeXchange Consortium with the dataset identifier PXD005779.Masteroppgave i biomedisinBMED39

Explaining the Surge of the Populist Radical Right: A Time-Series Analysis of the Effects of Immigration and the Economy in Norway

Populist radical right parties have become major forces in most Western democracies. Previous research has provided conflicting evidence on whether their electoral support can be explained by two structural developments: economic decline and increased immigration. Using time-series regression and almost 30 years of aggregated monthly polling data, we perform a novel test of the effects of economic decline and immigration on aggregate support for the Norwegian Progress Party. We find that the most beneficial time-periods for this party seem to be those of rising immigration and a booming economy. However, our findings also suggest that the effect of rising immigration is halted when the party holds government office. Thus, voter mobilization based on anti-immigration messages may represent a challenge for the Norwegian Progress Party and potentially other such parties going forward as they may become victims of their own success.Explaining the Surge of the Populist Radical Right: A Time-Series Analysis of the Effects of Immigration and the Economy in NorwaypublishedVersio

Uninformed or Misinformed in the Digital News Environment? How Social Media News Use Affects Two Dimensions of Political Knowledge

This article examines how the use of social media for news affects citizens’ knowledge about politics and current affairs. We employ a two-dimensional perspective on political knowledge and investigate how factual political knowledge, confidence in that knowledge, and misinformation, understood as the mismatch between factual political knowledge and confidence in knowledge, are related to social media news consumption. While earlier studies have suggested a negative relationship between social media news consumption and factual knowledge, there are indications that social media use may give people a general sense of being informed, even when they are not. Such general subjective knowledge might, however, differ from confidence in retrieved facts. Drawing on a two-wave panel study from Norway, we find evidence of a negative relationship between social media news consumption and both dimensions of knowledge. Notably, however, we do not find that social media news use leads to confidence in incorrect beliefs, suggesting that the digital media environment produces an uninformed, but not an overconfident, misinformed news audience.Uninformed or Misinformed in the Digital News Environment? How Social Media News Use Affects Two Dimensions of Political KnowledgepublishedVersio