People living in the area of Finland have never been a homogeneous group. Our cultural, genetic and linguistic heritage all have a diverse background and are in a constant state of change. People, ideas, customs and diseases have always moved from place to place and left their mark on the population. In a major research consortium, researchers are studying how these marks are still visible in people.
The University of Turku and one of Europe’s largest private AI labs Silo AI, with its large language model (LLM) arm SiloGen, are today announcing a large-scale initiative on open and trustworthy LLMs. SiloGen launches a consortium together with TurkuNLP research group to develop a family of open LLMs, including the world’s largest open source LLM. The initiative aims to ensure European digital sovereignty and democratise access to LLMs.
A new study identified microbial signatures which predicted the onset of type 2 diabetes during nearly 16 years of follow-up in a large Finnish population cohort. This study was conducted by researchers from the University of Turku and Finnish Institute of Health and Welfare (THL), together with international partners.
Eukaryotic plankton are an essential and highly diverse component of marine ecosystems. A research team from École Normale Supérieure (ENS) Paris, University of Turku and Anton Dohrn Zoological Station in Naples established their global geographic distribution using DNA data and a probabilistic model. The study highlights large variations in geographic structure between plankton groups depending on their diversity, body size, and ecology, which can be linked to variations in sensitivity to local environmental conditions.
Researchers discovered that a large amount of enterobacteria in the gut microbiota is related to long-term mortality risk in Finnish adult population.