University of Turku Collegia TCSMT & TIAS

Pedro Dinis, TCSM Postdoctoral Reseacher, Department of Biochemistry

Given free-reign by the Turku Collegium of Science and Medicine to write about anything made the choice of topic quite easy, as macromolecular crystallography has accompanied my budding scientific career. It also comes at a critical juncture in the field with the emergence of cryogenic electronic microscopy (Cryo-EM).

Two parts science, one part art

A young researcher eagerly enters a lab for the first time. His goal a simple affair, to crystallize a protein. He manages to get his protein both as pure and as concentrated as possible. The future is looking bright. But, what is the next step?

One could scour the literature regarding the topic of protein crystallization, without finding the precise way to do so. And the reason is not some cabal of old scientists gate-keeping future generations, but a simpler explanation: there is no exact way to lead a protein to form crystals. Each protein is as each individual, a unique, special snowflake. All that researcher has, as indeed we all do, are simple guidelines. You need to mix the protein with SOMETHING that will lead it to a controlled precipitation, i.e. crystal formation, instead of uncontrolled precipitation (think of curdling milk). Because the Universe is vast and full of SOMETHINGs, the best the scientific community has to offer is mixtures of salts, buffers and other precipitants that were previously shown to crystallize a protein (crystallization screens). Continue reading →

Collegium Researcher Helena Duffy

TIAS meeting, 13^th January 2020. ‘What is your research project about?’ ‘What interesting thing happened to you during your recent holidays?’ These are two of the four questions to be answered during the ‘Speed Dating’ exercise. Lasting four minutes (two minutes for each person), the exercise is designed to integrate the new arrivals into the existing cohort of TIAS scholars. The people I talk to all explore questions highly pertinent to the current social and environmental crises: effects of early stress, ethics of procurement, the destruction of the primeval forest in Poland… In this context, my own ghosts of terrified and exhausted women clutching their exhausted and terrified children on the ramp at Auschwitz seem remote to the point of being unreal. But the vision continues: soldiers are barking orders in an incomprehensible language and, held on short leashes, dogs are yelping. Is it how it happened or is it how I remember it from Spielberg’s Schindler’s List? ‘I study cultural representations of Jewish mothers during the Holocaust,’ I recite in front of each new person I introduce myself to. ‘I focus on how motherhood shaped women’s experience of Nazi persecution and how the mothers’ difficult choices are judged by literature.’ Even though in Finnish the term for the Nazi genocide of the Jews is almost the same as in English, I glimpse confusion on my interlocutors’ faces when I pronounce the word ‘Holocaust’. Is it because of the noise that fills the room as some forty people are trying to talk simultaneously and we can hardly hear our own thoughts? Or is it because the Holocaust is something that ‘didn’t happen in Finland’, as the Finnish Wikipedia page ‘Holokausti’ proudly announces. So as not to jeopardise the military cooperation between Berlin and Helsinki, Heinrich Himmler gave up, at least for the moment, on pursuing Finland’s Jews. Out of the 350 Jewish refugees who had sought shelter in Finland, only eight were deported. ‘Only’ or, should I say, ‘as many as’ eight? Continue reading →