Resistance responses blocking systemic movement of Potato virus A in potato

Peruna kestää A-virusta estämällä sen leviämistä Peruna on maissin ohella maailman kolmanneksi tärkein ravintokasvi vehnän ja riisin jälkeen. Perunaa lisätään kasvullisesti mukuloita istuttamalla, jolloin virukset siirtyvät sairaiden siemenmukuloiden välityksellä kasvukaudesta toiseen. Virustauteja voi torjua ainoastaan terveen siemenperunan ja kestävien lajikkeiden avulla. Kestävyys perustuu usein siihen, että kasvi estää viruksen leviämisen tartuntakohdasta välttyäkseen virustaudilta. Tässä työssä tutkittiin kolmea perunan A-viruksen (PVA) liikkumista estävää kestävyysmekanismia perunassa. Lisäksi työn kokeelliseen osaan oleellisesti kuuluvaa virustartutusta varten kehitettiin uusi paranneltu versio geenipyssystä. Tämä itse rakennettu laite optimoitiin PVA:n tartuttamiseen mahdollisimman helposti ja pienin käyttökustannuksin. Tutkimuksen kohteena olleessa perunan risteytysjälkeläistössä oli PVA:ta kestäviä kasveja (ryhmä nnr), jotka estivät viruksen liikkumisen aiheuttamatta oireita tartutuskohdassa, sekä kasveja, joissa PVA aiheutti kuolioläikkinä näkyvän yliherkkyysvasteen (ryhmä HR). Molemmissa kestävyystyypeissä virus pystyi monistumaan ja leviämään solusta soluun paikallisesti, mutta liikkuminen muihin kasvinosiin nilan kautta estyi. Ryhmän nnr kasveissa PVA-tartunta ei aiheuttanut tilastollisesti merkitsevää muutosta useimpien geenien ilmenemiseen tartuntakohdassa. Ainoastaan geeniperhe, joka ilmentää tiettyä proteinaasi-inhibiittoria (PI), reagoi PVA:han 24 tuntia tartutuksesta. Kun tämän PVA:han reagoivan geeniperheen jäsenet hiljennettiin nnr- perunalinjoissa, ne muuttuivat alttiiksi PVA:lle ja virus levisi tartuntakohdasta muihin kasvinosiin. Tulos osoittaa, että PI on viruskestävyystekijä. Lisäksi muut tutkimuksessa saadut tulokset tukevat mahdollisuutta, että PI estää PVA:n P1-proteinaasin toimintaa. HR-linjoissa todettiin erilaisiin puolustusvasteisiin liittyvien PR-geenien aktivoitumista PVA-tartunnan seurauksena, mutta myös ilman sitä kasvien kasvettua mullassa noin neljä viikkoa. Sen sijaan solukkoviljelyssä tai vasta kaksi viikkoa mullassa kasvaneissa kasveissa vastaavaa ei vielä todettu. Tulos viittaa siihen, että HR-perunat reagoivat herkemmin ympäristöön ja/tai kasvin kehitysasteeseen laukaisten puolustusvasteita, jotka saattavat parantaa kestävyyttä taudinaiheuttajia vastaan. Kolmas tutkittu kestävyystyyppi havaittiin Pito-perunalajikkeessa. Se muistutti nnr-kestävyyttä siten, että myös siinä viruksen liikkuminen nilassa muihin kasvinosiin estyi. PVA:n todettiin pysähtyvän vasta lehtiruodin tyvelle muodostuvaan irtoamisvyöhykkeeseen, mitä havainnollistettiin käyttämällä muunnettua PVA-rotua, joka tuotti UV-valossa fluoresoivaa vihreää valoa. Tulos viittaa siihen, että virus ei pääse kulkemaan vyöhykkeeseen kuuluvan suojaavan kerroksen läpi, jollei sillä ole pääsyä nilaan. Tällainen kestävyys on tarpeen, jotta virus ei voi korvata nilakuljetusta solusta soluun leviämisellä. Tulokset tuovat uusia näkökulmia kasvien viruskestävyyteen ja auttavat selittämään viruksen nilakuljetuksen estymistä sekä solusta soluun leviämisen pysähtymistä kestävissä kasveissa.

The Relationship Between Liquidity, Trading Activity and Return - Studies of the Finnish and Swedish Stock Markets

Liquidity, or how easy an investment is to buy or sell, is becoming increasingly important for financial market participants. The objective of this dissertation is to contribute to the understanding of how liquidity affects financial markets. The first essays analyze the actions taken by underwriters immediately after listing to improve liquidity of IPO stock. To estimate the impact of underwriter activity on the pricing of the IPOs, the order book during the first weeks of trading in the IPO stock is studied. Evidence of stabilization and liquidity enhancing activities by underwriters is found. The second half of the dissertation is concerned with the daily trading of stocks where liquidity may be impacted by policy issues such as changes in taxes or exchange fees and by opening the access to the markets for foreign investors. The desirability of a transaction tax on securities trading is addressed. An increase in transaction tax is found to cause lower prices and higher volatility. In the last essay the objective is to determine if the liquidity of a security has an impact on the return investors require. The results support the notion that returns are negatively correlated to liquidity.

Short-term Price Behavior and the Effect of Foreign Investors in Finnish Equity Markets (summary section only)

As globalization and capital free movement has increased, so has interest in the effects of that global money flow, especially during financial crises. The concern has been that large global money flows will affect the pricing of small local markets by causing, in particular, overreaction. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the body of work concerning short-term under- and overreaction and the short-term effects of foreign investment flow in the small Finnish equity markets. This thesis also compares foreign execution return to domestic execution return. This study’s results indicate that short-term under- and overreaction occurs in domestic-buy portfolios (domestic net buying) rather than in foreign-buy portfolios. This under- and overreaction, however, is not economically meaningful after controlling for the bid-ask bounce effect. Based on this finding, one can conclude that foreign investors do not have a destabilizing effect in the short-term in the Finnish markets. Foreign activity affects short-term returns. When foreign investors are net buyers (sellers) there are positive (negative) market adjusted returns. Literature related to nationality and institutional effect leads us to expect these kind of results. These foreign flows are persistent at a 5 % to 21 % level and the persistence of foreign buy flow is higher than the foreign sell flow. Foreign daily trading execution is worse than domestic execution. Literature which quantifies foreign investors as liquidity demanders and literature related to front-running leads us to expect poorer foreign execution than domestic execution.

Monetary Policy, Stock Price Misalignments and Macroeconomic Instability

Perhaps the most fundamental prediction of financial theory is that the expected returns on financial assets are determined by the amount of risk contained in their payoffs. Assets with a riskier payoff pattern should provide higher expected returns than assets that are otherwise similar but provide payoffs that contain less risk. Financial theory also predicts that not all types of risks should be compensated with higher expected returns. It is well-known that the asset-specific risk can be diversified away, whereas the systematic component of risk that affects all assets remains even in large portfolios. Thus, the asset-specific risk that the investor can easily get rid of by diversification should not lead to higher expected returns, and only the shared movement of individual asset returns – the sensitivity of these assets to a set of systematic risk factors – should matter for asset pricing. It is within this framework that this thesis is situated. The first essay proposes a new systematic risk factor, hypothesized to be correlated with changes in investor risk aversion, which manages to explain a large fraction of the return variation in the cross-section of stock returns. The second and third essays investigate the pricing of asset-specific risk, uncorrelated with commonly used risk factors, in the cross-section of stock returns. The three essays mentioned above use stock market data from the U.S. The fourth essay presents a new total return stock market index for the Finnish stock market beginning from the opening of the Helsinki Stock Exchange in 1912 and ending in 1969 when other total return indices become available. Because a total return stock market index for the period prior to 1970 has not been available before, academics and stock market participants have not known the historical return that stock market investors in Finland could have achieved on their investments. The new stock market index presented in essay 4 makes it possible, for the first time, to calculate the historical average return on the Finnish stock market and to conduct further studies that require long time-series of data.

Swedish Premium Pension Funds: Attributes and Performance

This study investigates the relationship between fund attributes and performance. The focus is on funds available in the Swedish Premium Pension system (PPM-funds). The aim has been to investigate whether administration fees, manager tenure or past performance are of importance for pension savers when they pick their PPM-funds. The results indicate that high fees are a disadvantage to pension savers investing in bond funds but not to those investing in stock funds. Manager tenure has no relationship with performance. There is evidence of performance persistency in most of the investigated fund categories.

Swedish advertising language in Finland mirrored by the newspaper advertisements of the Stockmanns department store during the 20th century

The advertising business is often said to favour a modern, innovative language use. This is a statement not easily verified. Newspaper ads are in fact the genre of written language that linguists have paid the least attention to. People writing texts for newspaper ads are individuals representing contemporary language use. Advertisements representing different periods therefore diverge not only regarding the change of style and form advertising undergoes over time, but changes in the language itself also reflect the continuous process of alteration in a speech community. Advertisements and marketing material on the whole, are also read by many individuals who otherwise are not accustomed to reading at all. The marketing manager, the copywriter and the Art Director, in other words, produce texts that unconsciously function as language models. Changes are not created by, or urged on by linguistic expertise, but by ordinary users confronting other ordinary users. From a sociolinguistic perspective the widely diffused advertising language is therefore a most influential factor.

Reklamsvenska i Finland speglad genom varuhuset Stockmanns tidningsannonser under det 20e seklet - Swedish Advertising Language in Finland Mirrored by the Newspaper Advertisements of the Stockmanns Department Store during the 20th Century

Reklam sägs använda ett modernt, gärna ett nyskapande språk. Detta är ett påstående som inte så lätt kan verifieras. Tidningsannonsen är troligen den skriftspråksgenre som har fått minst uppmärksamhet av språkforskare. De som skriver texten i en tidningsannons är personer som representerar det samtida språkbruket. Annonser som representerar olika tidsepoker skiljer sig därför från varandra inte bara genom att annonsen förändras i fråga om stil och form. Annonsens språk avspeglar också den språkliga förändringsprocess som kontinuerligt pågår i varje språksamhälle. Annonser, och marknadsföringsmaterial över huvud taget, läses också av många människor som i övrigt läser mycket litet eller kanske inte alls. Marknadsföraren, reklamskribenten (copywriter) och AD:n producerar m.a.o. texter som på ett omedvetet sätt kommer att vara språkmodeller för sina läsare. Förändringar i språket kreeras inte och drivs inte på av språkforskare, utan av vanliga språkbrukare i interaktion med andra språkbrukare. Sett ur ett sociolingvistiskt perspektiv har det vitt spridda reklamspråket därför inflytande på språket i samhället. Syftet med det reklamspråksprojekt som presenteras i föreliggande rapport är att analysera hur och när förändringar i svenskan som uppträder i Sverige dyker upp i annonser som skrivs på svenska i Finland. Reklam på svenska Finland under 1900-talet står i fokus, och tidningsannonser för Stockmanns varuhus i Helsingfors utgör primärmaterialet. Tidningsannonser för varuhuset Nordiska Kompaniet (NK) i Stockholm under motsvarande tid tjänar som jämförelsematerial. I denna rapport presenteras projektets syfte, de uppställda forskningsfrågorna, och resonemanget illustreras med exempel ur projektmaterialet. Rapporten innehåller också en beskrivning av projektets reklamdatabas och basfakta om material och metoder. -

Globalization and the Political : in the Borderlands with the Zapatista Movement

This study explores the meaning, content and significance of the political as manifest in the Mexican Zapatista movement as historically and geopolitically situated struggle. The case study undertakes a critical analysis of the development, organization, practice and discourse of the movement by drawing on fieldwork experiences, interviews, discussions, documents, films and other material produced by the movement, and the critical engagement with the research of others, especially in Latin America and Mexico. The dissertation poses the need to reconsider what constitutes and what we understand by the political , related particularly to the challenges provided by the critical globalization literature, decolonization and the study of social movements. The analysis encompasses several inter-related levels: the theoretical knowledge regarding the conceptualization of the political; the methodological level, regarding how such research can and should be conducted and knowledge claims formulated given the inescapable context and effects of global power relations; and the substantive level of adding specific information and analytical insights to existing knowledge of the Zapatista movement. As a result of conceptualization of a range of practices and processes, distinct understandings of the political can be underlined. Firstly, the conception of the indigenous and the struggles as indigenous movements as specifically political, not just a cultural or ethnic identity or a static quality but rather, an active consciousness integrally linked both to a longer history of oppression and as political articulation in the concrete context and lived experience of contemporary struggle. Secondly, the practice of autonomy as central to an understanding of the political in the context of the Zapatista struggle as a practical response to the situation of oppression, counter-insurgency, siege and conflict in Chiapas, as well as a positively informed mode of political self-understanding, expression and practice in its own right. Thirdly, the notion of geopolitical positioning as important to understanding of the political that encompasses the historicity of specific context and the power relations which shape that context, developed in two different ways: in regard to the positioning of the researcher and knowledge production with and about the Zapatistas, and in regard to the practice and knowledge of the Zapatistas as a decolonizing force in their encounters, interaction and relations with others, especially the global civil society. Finally, the role of silence, absence, invisibility, revelation and hiding in political practice as a deliberate strategy in response to oppressive power. -

Pietismin kuva - ikkuna yksityiseen hengellisyyteen : Johann Arndtin opetukset pietistisen embleemin perustana

The image of Pietism a window to personal spirituality. The teachings of Johann Arndt as the basis of Pietist emblems The Pietist effect on spiritual images has to be scrutinised as a continuum initiating from the teachings of Johann Arndt who created a protestant iconography that defended the status of pictures and images as the foundation of divine revelation. Pietist artworks reveal Arndtian part of secret, eternal world, and God. Even though modern scholars do not regarded him as a founding father of Pietism anymore, his works have been essential for the development of iconography, and the themes of the Pietist images are linked with his works. For Arndt, the starting point is in the affecting love for Christ who suffered for the humankind. The reading experience is personal and the words point directly at the reader and thus appear as evidence of the guilt of the reader as well as of the love of God. Arndt uses bounteous and descriptive language which has partially affected promoting and picturing of many themes. Like Arndt, Philipp Jakob Spener also emphasised the heart that believes. The Pietist movement was born to oppose detached faith and the lack of the Holy Ghost. Christians touched by the teachings of Arndt and Spener began to create images out of metaphors presented by Arndt. As those people were part of the intelligentsia, it was natural that the fashionable emblematics of the 17th century was moulded for the personal needs. For Arndt, the human heart is manifested as a symbol of soul, personal faith or unbelief as well as an allegory of the burning love for Jesus. Due to this fact, heart emblems were gradually widely used and linked with the love of Christ. In the Nordic countries, the introduction of emblems emanated from the gentry s connections to the Central Europe where emblems were exploited in order to decorate books, artefacts, interiors, and buildings as well as visual/literal trademarks of the intelligentsia. Emblematic paintings in the churches of the castles of Venngarn (1665) and Läckö (1668), owned by Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, are one of the most central interior paintings preserved in the Nordic countries, and they emphasise personal righteous life. Nonetheless, it was the books by Arndt and the Poet s Society in Nurnberg that bound the Swedish gentry and the scholars of the Pietist movement together. The Finnish gentry had no castles or castle churches so they supported county churches, both in building and in maintenance. As the churches were not private, their iconography could not be private either. Instead, people used Pietist symbols such as Agnus Dei, Cor ardens, an open book, beams, king David, frankincense, wood themes and Virtues. In the Pietist images made for public spaces, the attention is focused on pedagogical, metaphorical, and meaningful presentation as well as concealed statements.

Tsoi Yuen Resistance and Post-80s Generation: A new wave of domestic social movement

Hong Kong was once a British colony and has been under the sovereignty of People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1997. However, some of the unjust practices and colonial legacies are infiltrated into the development ideology as well as the social structures. The construction of intercity express railway project announced in 2008 causing the demolishment of Tsoi Yuen Tsuen, a “non-indigenous” agricultural village in Hong Kong, was one of the current examples. Tsoi Yuen village was established under the former colonial sovereignty sixty years ago. Approximately 450 populations were affected that they had to relocate their homeland involuntarily. However, these villagers were very attached to their homelands and were unwilling to move, and meanwhile they found that they were absent in the government’s consultation and decision-making process. Soon they began their resistance and demanded for “No Move! No Demolish!”. Their movement was strongly supported by a group of “Post-80s generation” and turned into the most important social movement of the city in recent years. In fact, demolition of Tsoi Yuen Village for city development is not an isolated case in the city. Meanwhile the situation is getting worse in Mainland China. I chose the case study of Tsoi Yuen Resistance from 2008 to 2011 for revelation of the complicated colonial history and postcolonial era of Hong Kong. I focused on discussing the Tsoi Yuen Resistance and the Post-80s movement, and how they have exposed the tension between top-down urban planning and development and public movements fighting for a more democratic process in choosing their way of living. Through the study of a village movement which as well as the rationale behind the Post-80s’ support, I hoped to illustrate how this movement has awaken a different sense of living for the new generations in the midst of the high-sounding urban development. It is an opportunity to examine Hong Kong’s colonial epoch in a different perspective: through studying the Tsoi Yuen Village, let them (subalterns) speak for themselves. Furthermore, the significance of this resistance, taking place eleven years after the handover to the PRC, is an important fact that I shall not miss in later discussion. Last but not least, during the resistance, advanced technology and social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, iPhone were used by Post 80s generation to spread the latest information in order to attract public’s concern and participation. Therefore, apart from studying Tsoi Yuen Resistance as a local social movement, I also regard it as a part of the global movement in perusing ecological lifestyle and civil society. How Post 80s’ generation manipulates the global idea in a local context will also be examined.

Tracing water movement by means of Escherichia coli bacteriophages

Tiivistelmä: Escherichia coli bacteriofaagit merkkiaineena vesien kulkeutumistutkimuksissa