Environmentally friendly temporary anti-mould treatment of packaging material before drying

According to FAO – ISPM No 15, in international trade wood packaging material on the basis of sawn timber requires to be heat-treated to avoid spreading of harmful organisms. “Heat-treatment” means a minimum core temperature of the wood of 56° C for a minimum of 30 minutes. ISPM No 15 does not define moisture content and therefore does not include rules for the drying process.Practitioners report that fresh sapwood, after having undergone a pure heat treatment without any kind of drying, shows a great affinity to fungi (mould and blue stain). Even though the infestation does not affect the strength properties of the wood, it must be considered as an optical and a sanitary problem. An environmentally friendly, cheap and easy to use technique for temporary anti-mould protection of heattreated wood is needed to bridge the time span between sawing, heat treatment and air or kiln drying.Results derived from laboratory experiments have shown that the heat-treatment affects the elution of the lipid components within pine sapwood. While searching for alternatives to conventional preservation methods, different environmentally compliant agents (particularly aqueous solutions containing sodiumand potassium carbonate) were found to inhibit the germination of mould and blue stain fungi spores on wood packaging material surfaces in a temporary manner. Besides their effectiveness, the usage of these agents to achieving the temporary protection (e.g. for a couple of weeks) is economically feasible and easily applicable in industrial practice. However, drying (either naturally or technically) is indispensable to avoid fungal hazard on the long run. A combination of temporary treatment immediately after sawing followed by a drying-process (long lasting protection) seems to be the most effective method to protect ISPM No 15 treated wood packaging material against mould

Challenges and advances in the heterologous expression of cellulolytic enzymes: a review

Second generation biofuel development is increasingly reliant on the recombinant expression of cellulases. Designing or identifying successful expression systems is thus of preeminent importance to industrial progress in the field. Recombinant production of cellulases has been performed using a wide range of expression systems in bacteria, yeasts and plants. In a number of these systems, particularly when using bacteria and plants, significant challenges have been experienced in expressing full-length proteins or proteins at high yield. Further difficulties have been encountered in designing recombinant systems for surface-display of cellulases and for use in consolidated bioprocessing in bacteria and yeast. For establishing cellulase expression in plants, various strategies are utilized to overcome problems, such as the auto-hydrolysis of developing plant cell walls. In this review, we investigate the major challenges, as well as the major advances made to date in the recombinant expression of cellulases across the commonly used bacterial, plant and yeast systems. We review some of the critical aspects to be considered for industrial-scale cellulase production

The HBP1 tumor suppressor is a negative epigenetic regulator of MYCN driven neuroblastoma through interaction with the PRC2 complex

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The GenTree Platform: growth traits and tree-level environmental data in 12 European forest tree species

Background: Progress in the field of evolutionary forest ecology has been hampered by the huge challenge of phenotyping trees across their ranges in their natural environments, and the limitation in high-resolution environmental information. Findings: The GenTree Platform contains phenotypic and environmental data from 4,959 trees from 12 ecologically and economically important European forest tree species: Abies alba Mill. (silver fir), Betula pendula Roth. (silver birch), Fagus sylvatica L. (European beech), Picea abies (L.) H. Karst (Norway spruce), Pinus cembra L. (Swiss stone pine), Pinus halepensis Mill. (Aleppo pine), Pinus nigra Arnold (European black pine), Pinus pinaster Aiton (maritime pine), Pinus sylvestris L. (Scots pine), Populus nigra L. (European black poplar), Taxus baccata L. (English yew), and Quercus petraea (Matt.) Liebl. (sessile oak). Phenotypic (height, diameter at breast height, crown size, bark thickness, biomass, straightness, forking, branch angle, fructification), regeneration, environmental in situ measurements (soil depth, vegetation cover, competition indices), and environmental modeling data extracted by using bilinear interpolation accounting for surrounding conditions of each tree (precipitation, temperature, insolation, drought indices) were obtained from trees in 194 sites covering the species’ geographic ranges and reflecting local environmental gradients. Conclusion: The GenTree Platform is a new resource for investigating ecological and evolutionary processes in forest trees. The coherent phenotyping and environmental characterization across 12 species in their European ranges allow for a wide range of analyses from forest ecologists, conservationists, and macro-ecologists. Also, the data here presented can be linked to the GenTree Dendroecological collection, the GenTree Leaf Trait collection, and the GenTree Genomic collection presented elsewhere, which together build the largest evolutionary forest ecology data collection available

Between but not within species variation in the distribution of fitness effects

New mutations provide the raw material for evolution and adaptation. The distribution of fitness effects (DFE) describes the spectrum of effects of new mutations that can occur along a genome, and is therefore of vital interest in evolutionary biology. Recent work has uncovered striking similarities in the DFE between closely related species, prompting us to ask whether there is variation in the DFE among populations of the same species, or among species with different degrees of divergence, i.e., whether there is variation in the DFE at different levels of evolution. Using exome capture data from six tree species sampled across Europe we characterised the DFE for multiple species, and for each species, multiple populations, and investigated the factors potentially influencing the DFE, such as demography, population divergence and genetic background. We find statistical support for there being variation in the DFE at the species level, even among relatively closely related species. However, we find very little difference at the population level, suggesting that differences in the DFE are primarily driven by deep features of species biology, and that evolutionarily recent events, such as demographic changes and local adaptation, have little impact

Large-Scale Recombinant Production of the SARS-CoV-2 Proteome for High-Throughput and Structural Biology Applications

The highly infectious disease COVID-19 caused by the Betacoronavirus SARS-CoV-2 poses a severe threat to humanity and demands the redirection of scientific efforts and criteria to organized research projects. The international COVID19-NMR consortium seeks to provide such new approaches by gathering scientific expertise worldwide. In particular, making available viral proteins and RNAs will pave the way to understanding the SARS-CoV-2 molecular components in detail. The research in COVID19-NMR and the resources provided through the consortium are fully disclosed to accelerate access and exploitation. NMR investigations of the viral molecular components are designated to provide the essential basis for further work, including macromolecular interaction studies and high-throughput drug screening. Here, we present the extensive catalog of a holistic SARS-CoV-2 protein preparation approach based on the consortium’s collective efforts. We provide protocols for the large-scale production of more than 80% of all SARS-CoV-2 proteins or essential parts of them. Several of the proteins were produced in more than one laboratory, demonstrating the high interoperability between NMR groups worldwide. For the majority of proteins, we can produce isotope-labeled samples of HSQC-grade. Together with several NMR chemical shift assignments made publicly available on covid19-nmr.com, we here provide highly valuable resources for the production of SARS-CoV-2 proteins in isotope-labeled form

Environmentally friendly temporary anti-mould treatment of packaging material before drying

According to FAO – ISPM No 15, in international trade wood packaging material on the basis of sawn timber requires to be heat-treated to avoid spreading of harmful organisms. “Heat-treatment” means a minimum core temperature of the wood of 56° C for a minimum of 30 minutes. ISPM No 15 does not define moisture content and therefore does not include rules for the drying process.Practitioners report that fresh sapwood, after having undergone a pure heat treatment without any kind of drying, shows a great affinity to fungi (mould and blue stain). Even though the infestation does not affect the strength properties of the wood, it must be considered as an optical and a sanitary problem. An environmentally friendly, cheap and easy to use technique for temporary anti-mould protection of heattreated wood is needed to bridge the time span between sawing, heat treatment and air or kiln drying.Results derived from laboratory experiments have shown that the heat-treatment affects the elution of the lipid components within pine sapwood. While searching for alternatives to conventional preservation methods, different environmentally compliant agents (particularly aqueous solutions containing sodiumand potassium carbonate) were found to inhibit the germination of mould and blue stain fungi spores on wood packaging material surfaces in a temporary manner. Besides their effectiveness, the usage of these agents to achieving the temporary protection (e.g. for a couple of weeks) is economically feasible and easily applicable in industrial practice. However, drying (either naturally or technically) is indispensable to avoid fungal hazard on the long run. A combination of temporary treatment immediately after sawing followed by a drying-process (long lasting protection) seems to be the most effective method to protect ISPM No 15 treated wood packaging material against mould