Compendium: On existing and missing links between energy poverty and other scholarly debates

ENGAGER Working Group 4 has just produced an extensive compendium on existing and missing links between energy poverty and other scholarly debates. The compendium is edited Ana Stojilovska (HU), Lidija Zivcic (SI), Ricardo Barbosa (PT), Katrin Grossmann (DE) and Rachel Guyet (FR), with contributions from 10 other authors from across Europe. The compendium is one of the most detailed and extensive reviews of its kind that have been published to date. In the introduction of the compendium, the authors note: We publish this work, undertaken between March 2019 and February 2019, in the midst of a huge worldwide health crisis that will alter life and living circumstances. We are aware that this crisis is likely to impact vulnerable people, among them the energy poor, in severe ways. We only start to understand how important energy is as a basis of living and of participation in society. Staying at home is only possible for those who have a home, and it is bearable only if energy can be used for cooking, heating – and communicating. We see this compendium as a living document that will profit from discussion, revision and updating.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Low Temperature-Dependent Salmonid Alphavirus Glycoprotein Processing and Recombinant Virus-Like Particle Formation

Pancreas disease (PD) and sleeping disease (SD) are important viral scourges in aquaculture of Atlantic salmon and rainbow trout. The etiological agent of PD and SD is salmonid alphavirus (SAV), an unusual member of the Togaviridae (genus Alphavirus). SAV replicates at lower temperatures in fish. Outbreaks of SAV are associated with large economic losses of ∼17 to 50 million $/year. Current control strategies rely on vaccination with inactivated virus formulations that are cumbersome to obtain and have intrinsic safety risks. In this research we were able to obtain non-infectious virus-like particles (VLPs) of SAV via expression of recombinant baculoviruses encoding SAV capsid protein and two major immunodominant viral glycoproteins, E1 and E2 in Spodoptera frugiperda Sf9 insect cells. However, this was only achieved when a temperature shift from 27°C to lower temperatures was applied. At 27°C, precursor E2 (PE2) was misfolded and not processed by host furin into mature E2. Hence, E2 was detected neither on the surface of infected cells nor as VLPs in the culture fluid. However, when temperatures during protein expression were lowered, PE2 was processed into mature E2 in a temperature-dependent manner and VLPs were abundantly produced. So, temperature shift-down during synthesis is a prerequisite for correct SAV glycoprotein processing and recombinant VLP production

Making the Most of Qualitative Evidence for Energy Poverty Mitigation:A Research Agenda and Call for Action

The field of energy poverty brings together a wide range of researchers, from numerous disciplines and using a range of methods. Qualitative research on energy poverty, especially on the lived experience of energy poor households, has burgeoned in recent years. Contributions stem from researchers based in a range of disciplines and nations, and studying varied contexts and spatial patterns of energy poverty (Bouzarovski and Tirado Herrero 2017; Aklin et al. 2018). This growing interest in qualitative evidence on energy poverty has given new insights into the complex, multi-dimensional and dynamic nature of this problem. It has helped contextualise existing quantitative data, by showing how policy plays out in peoples’ lives, and revealing what is working or not in these households’ everyday basis.The strengths of qualitative research are numerous, but principally, it allow us to grasp the systemic nature of this problem and engage in people centred research. As qualitative researchers we use terms like multi-dimensional, multi-scalar, dynamic and relational to describe the phenomenon of energy poverty. Moreover, while quantitative understandings represent people as numbers, percentages or proportions, qualitative work studies the daily lives of people. In short, qualitative research centres energy-poor and practitioner experiences as the main focus of analysis. As a result, it can play an emancipatory role in representing the interests of people experiencing specific problems. Hidden dimensions of energy poverty that are washed away in quantitative data aggregates can be revealed through qualitative research. This contributes to more appropriate and tailored policy interventions that better reflect the needs of energy poor households.This policy brief offers a research agenda and call for action to ‘make the most’ of qualitative evidence relating to energy poverty, based on discussions from an ENGAGER workshop in Amsterdam (30-31 October 2019) involving 50 researchers, policy-makers and practitioners from across the Netherlands and the ENGAGER network