Kirsi Mikkonen

Kirsi Mikkonen says: “A rapidly urbanizing society poses an increased need for fresh and nutritious vegetables of high quality and extended shelf-life. Currently, up to 50% of produced vegetables are discarded before being consumed, which burdens the environment and increases CO2 emissions unnecessarily. The financial losses caused by this wastage in Europe and the US total around €200 billion annually. Reducing vegetable wastage, by extending their shelf-life, could decrease their price and increase their consumption. The main reasons for vegetable waste are over-ripening, browning, and tissue degradation. Despite their major importance, the detailed mechanisms of vegetable deterioration after processing and packaging are poorly understood. The VegeSense project will identify the key metabolites involved in this process, giving a greater understanding of these mechanisms leading to vegetable quality deterioration. This will enable the advancement of packaging technologies to extend vegetable shelf-life.”

Jennifer Baker

Niklas Björkström

Simona Chera

Bjarne Nørgaard

Amelia-Elena Rotaru

Miia Mäkelä

Pablo Iván Nikel Mayer

Petrine Wellendorph

Petrine Wellendorph says: “γ-Aminobutyric acid (GABA) is the brain’s most prominent inhibitory neurotransmitter involved in overall regulation of nerve cell activity. GABA acts via receptors sitting on the surface of cells. Many clinically used drugs act via GABA receptors to produce a depressant effect, such the calming effect seen with the drug Valium. There is, however, a continued need for understanding the GABA system and its minutious regulation to utilize the broad pharmacological potential. This project focuses on proteins involved in control of the basal inhibition level in the brain, so-called tonic inhibition. We wish to delineate the importance of tonic inhibition by investigating both GABA receptors, GABA transporters and metabolic enzymes important for GABA homeostasis.  This will be achieved by using designed compounds and various mouse models. Altogether, the project will advance our understanding of the moleular underpinnings of the GABA system in the brain and identify new therapeutic angles to treat neurological disease.”

Konstantin Khodosevich

Konstantin Khodosevich says: “Psychiatric disorders are one of the most common and devastating human disorders that affect hundreds of millions of people world-wide. While some treatments for major psychiatric disorders have been developed, often these are non-specific and have significant side-effects, which is mainly due to lack of our understanding of how neuronal networks that encode psychiatric disorders arise during human brain development. In my research program, I will trace the development of psychiatric disorders in human brain from the very beginning of brain maturation and will unravel what goes wrong in neuronal networks in disordered brains. I will further reveal the period of impaired brain maturation when neuronal networks are still flexible and could be repaired, thus allowing to develop therapeutic interventions that drive brain maturation towards normally functioning healthy brain.”