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Background: The koji mold, Aspergillus oryzae is widely used for the production of industrial enzymes due to its particularly high protein secretion capacity and ability to perform post-translational modifications. However, systemic analysis of its secretion system is lacking, generally due to the poorly annotated proteome. Results: Here we defined a functional protein secretory component list of A. oryzae using a previously reported secretory model of S. cerevisiae as scaffold. Additional secretory components were obtained by blast search with the functional components reported in other closely related fungal species such as Aspergillus nidulans and Aspergillus niger. To evaluate the defined component list, we performed transcriptome analysis on three α-amylase over-producing strains with varying levels of secretion capacities. Specifically, secretory components involved in the ER-associated processes (including components involved in the regulation of transport between ER and Golgi) were significantly up-regulated, with many of them never been identified for A. oryzae before. Furthermore, we defined a complete list of the putative A. oryzae secretome and monitored how it was affected by overproducing amylase. Conclusion: In combination with the transcriptome data, the most complete secretory component list and the putative secretome, we improved the systemic understanding of the secretory machinery of A. oryzae in response to high levels of protein secretion. The roles of many newly predicted secretory components were experimentally validated and the enriched component list provides a better platform for driving more mechanistic studies of the protein secretory pathway in this industrially important fungus.

The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the three fastest warming regions on Earth. Here we review Holocene proxy records of marine and terrestrial palaeoclimate in the region, and discuss possible forcing mechanisms underlying past change, with a specific focus on past warm periods. Our aim is to critically evaluate the mechanisms by which palaeoclimate changes might have occurred, in order to provide a longer-term context for assessing the drivers of recent warming. Two warm events are well recorded in the Holocene palaeoclimate record, namely the early Holocene warm period, and the `Mid Holocene Hypsithermal' (MHH), whereas there are fewer proxy data for the `Mediaeval Warm Period' (MWP) and the `Recent Rapid Regional' (RRR) warming. We show that the early Holocene warm period and MHH might be explained by relatively abrupt shifts in position of the Southern Westerlies, superimposed on slower solar insolation changes. A key finding of our synthesis is that the marine and terrestrial records in the AP appear to show markedly different behaviour during the MHH. This might be partly explained by contrasts in the seasonal insolation forcing between these records. Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) has been implicated in several of the prominent changes through the Holocene but there are still differences in interpretation of the proxy record that make its influence difficult to assess. Further work is required to investigate contrasts between marine and terrestrial proxy records, east—west contrasts in palaeoclimate, the history of CDW, to retrieve a long onshore high resolution record of the Holocene, and determine the role of sea ice in driving or modulating palaeoclimate change, along with further efforts to study the proxy record of the RRR and the MWP.

This issue is the final synthesis report by QUEEN (Quaternary Environments of the Eurasian North), an à la carte programme of the ESF (European Science Foundation) Standing Committee for Life and Environmental Sciences (LESC), supported through funds from Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. In addition to several national projects, the European Union project Ice Sheets and Climate in the Eurasian Arctic (Eurasian Ice Sheets) formed part of the program during the period 1998 to 2000. Support from many Russian institutions and individual researchers was essential for organizing the numerous expeditions into remote areas of the northernmost Eurasia and the adjacent Arctic Ocean. QUEEN was initially suggested in 1995 when several research groups of western European and Russian scientists studying the Quaternary in remote and poorly known regions of the Eurasian North decided that they could improve the scope and depth of their investigations through international coordination and cooperation. By that time several of the European groups had already acquired substantial experience in collaborative studies of Quaternary processes and sedimentation history along the polar North Atlantic margins through a similar project, PONAM (Elverhøi et al., 1998), and by working on a bilateral basis with their Russian colleagues.QUEEN was launched in 1996 for a 5-yr period and ended in 2002 after an extension for another 2 yr. The ESF-based funding for QUEEN allowed to conduct annual workshops for discussing the spectacular new observations from areas which had been largely inaccessible in earlier, political more troublesome times, and to jointly plan and coordinate field work for each successive year. A particular emphasis was on bringing numerous young researchers from Russia together with their western partners for scientific exchange within an international framework. Three of the workshops have yielded collections of papers summarizing the

QUEEN is a program of the European Science Foundation (ESF) which aims at deciphering the Late Quaternary history of a remote part of our world whichhoweveris of eminent importance for an understanding of mid- to long-term climatic variations over the last two climatic cycles, some 200,000 years. The ambiguities of reconstructions of the extent of the Eurasian ice sheets and the poor understanding of the paleoenvironment of the Arctic Ocean have attracted research groups to conduct field studies in northern Eurasia and marine expeditions to the adjacent shelf and the Arctic Ocean. Such a substantial number of studies was conducted in bilateral cooperations between scientific institutions in Russia and in western Europe that the ESF decided to bring them together under the QUEEN umbrella.An important step for QUEEN was the publication of a first volume of scientific papers (Larsen et al., 1999E. Larsen, S. Funder and J. Thiede, Editors, Late Quaternary History of Northwestern Russia and Adjacent ShelvesBoreas vol. 28 (1) (1999), pp. 1242.Larsen et al., 1999). It included a comprehensive reconstruction of the extent of Weichselian ice sheetsespecially of those at the Last Glacial maximum (LGM) (Svendsen et al., 1999). The results of QUEEN field work demonstrated that the LGM ice sheet was substantially smaller than had previously been anticipated by especially one influential school of scientists (e.g. Grosswald, 1998). QUEEN now presents its second volume of scientific papers to an international community, as this special issue of Global and Planetary Change. The 26 papers have been selected so that they address two major issues: (1) the Late Quaternary paleoenvironmental history of the Arctic Ocean and its shelf seas, and (2) the terrestrial and limnic stratigraphy and paleonvironmental history of the Late Quaternary in northernmost Eurasia. In each of the sections, we progress from general overviews to considerable regional detail. The geographical distribution of

Appreciation of food is based on the perception all five human senses, vision, tactile, auditory, taste and olfaction. Sensory integration of chewing resistance, melting properties, crisp sound etc. will give a further perception of the food, which is called the mouth feel. In this report, a model experiment performed on crispbread is described, which was based on information fusion from human sense analogies of olfaction, auditory and tactile. Five samples of crispbread with various hardness and flour composition were placed in a special "crush chamber". While crushed, information corresponding to three senses could be obtained - auditory by a microphone, tactile by a force sensor and smell by leading gases from the crushed material to a gas sensor array. To evaluate the information obtained, multivariate pattern recognition methods, i.e. principal component analysis and artificial neural nets were used to search for structure and correlation in the data. It was shown that by using only the auditory information, the samples could not be separated. The tactile information alone could separate three samples, and the smell information one sample. By combining all sense analogues, all five samples could be separated.

Antarktis

James Ross Island, Antarktis

Geologi

Antarktis, James Ross Island

Marine and glacigene deposits, dated with varying degrees of certainty to isotope stage 5 (130-74 ka) are exposed in coastal cliffs in 18 areas and localities in northern and eastern Greenland. Dating methods include thermoluminescence (TL), U-Th methods and correlation with the deep sea record. Amino-acid parameters are used for correlation between localities. Deposits from the last interglaciation (isotope substage 5e) are rare and have been found only at three localities in both West and East Greenland. Their mollusc and foraminifer faunas indicate more vigorous sea surface circulation and sea surface temperatures some degrees higher than known from the Holocene. During this warm period ice sheet growth began. In Northwest Greenland the ice sheet reached its maximum for the last ice age during the succeeding phase, provisionally correlated with isotope substage 5d. This was followed by a new warm period with increased influx of warm subarctic water, and high summer temperatures on land, provisionally correlated with isotope substage 5a. In East Greenland the observations indicate a more complex ice sheet history. The record from Greenland is very similar to that obtained in adjacent coastal areas of the high Arctic implying that the rapid shifts from warm to cold during isotope stage 5 were especially conducive to the formation of the embryonic North American and Scandinavian ice sheets at high northern latitudes, probably because the pulses of warm water were required to advect sufficient moisture into these areas to allow the growth of continental ice sheets.

Geologi, klima