The Nanoscience Days on 8-9 of October: Molecules turn into nanoswitches and bacteriophages prevent fish bacterial diseases

The Nanoscience Days 2019 will be held on 8th–9th of October, 2019 at Ģֱ, Finland. The conference serves as a multidisciplinary platform to discuss the latest findings in biology, chemistry and physics, including DNA origami, quantum technology, as well as a Senior Editor story about publishing process in Nature. This year’s conference brings together 250 nanoscientist and also raises the young scientists in the spotlight.
Chair of the conference Toni Metsänen and Research coordinator Heli Lehtivuori are proud of the scientific program of the conference, which includes high-profile plenary lectures and also many presentations of young researchers.
Published
7.10.2019

One of the plenary speakers in the conference is the Associate Professor Lotta-Riina Sundberg from Ģֱ. Her research group focuses on bacteriophages, which can kill the flavobacteria that cause skin and gill infections in fish. The aim is to develop bacteriophage treatments to fish to prevent the bacterial disease.

 “Promising results have been achieved when fish have been impregnated with bacteriophages before the bacterial disease has hit. The phages are inoculated to the skin mucus of fish. They attach to the mucus and may persist for several days in the mucosal surface, says Sundberg.

At the focus of Sundberg’s research is the phage-bacterium co-evolution: What are the bacterial resistance mechanisms toward infectious phages? Sundberg is studying bacterial CRISPR memory that store the genetic information of phage infections.

Chemical compounds can be used as artificial communication molecules. Professor Jonathan Clayden from University of Bristol is studying how to make molecules fold into a certain shape triggered by external stimuli. This knowledge could be used to build various nanoswitches.

“We are building simplified versions of the molecular communication devices that Nature uses to communicate through impermeable membranes. We hope to learn more about how these natural structures work and also we want to find out how to make artificial switchable molecules that could work in miniaturised chemical systems”, says Clayden, who is visiting Finland for the first time.

Clayden is an author of the popular textbook Organic Chemistry (Clayden, Greeves and Warren, OUP 2012).

The editor of Nature Communications gives insights into scientific publication

This year Nanoscience Days will also include insights into scientific publication. In her lecture, a senior editor Ariane Vartanian from Nature Communications opens the publication process of a scientific journal. She gives advice to the researchers how to turn good research results into an accepted article.
The chair of the organizing committee Toni Metsänen expects a diverse and bustling scientific conference.

“The program includes several presentations by young scientists. It is exiting to hear results straight from the laboratory”, says Metsänen.

Nanoscience Center (NSC) at the Ģֱ (JYU) is an interdisciplinary research organization where physicists, chemists and biologists work together to study nature at the nanoscale. More than 140 researchers are working at NSC.

Read more about the research of Lotta-Riina Sundberg on #JYUnity:

Link to Nanoscience Days 2019 (#NSDays2019) programme: 

For further information:
Chair of the conference Toni Metsänen, toni.t.metsanen@jyu.fi, tel. +40 661 0302
Communications officer Tanja Heikkinen, tanja.s.heikkinen@jyu.fi, tel. +50 581 8351

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