Wall Teichoic Acid Glycosylation of Staphylococcus epidermidis and the Interaction of Staphylococci with the Human Host

Die Dissertation ist bis zum 7. November 2025 gesperrt

Epidemiologie und Therapie bei Skabies: Untersuchung an einem Patientenkollektiv der Hautklinik Tübingen von 2015 - 2020

Frühe Erwähnung fand die Skabies (Krätze) bereits in der Bibel. Heutzutage ist diese Erkrankung vielen Menschen nur noch unter dem umgangssprachlichen Begriff „sich die Krätze an den Hals ärgern“ bekannt. In den letzten Jahren wurde jedoch vermehrt über steigende Skabies-Fallzahlen und Versagen der Therapie berichtet . Thema der vorliegenden Arbeit ist daher die Epidemiologie und Therapie bei Skabies

Le français en Afrique multilingue

In unserer Podcast-Reihe „Französisch im mehrsprachigen Afrika“ erkunden wir den Reichtum und die sprachliche Vielfalt der französischsprachigen Menschen aus Afrika, die heute in Deutschland leben. Einige von ihnen kamen im November 2024 an die Universität Tübingen, um an soziolinguistischen Interviews mit Studierenden des Linguistikkurses „Französisch im mehrsprachigen Afrika“ teilzunehmen. Diese Interviews waren eine Gelegenheit, über ihre Sprachen, ihre Bedeutung für ihre Identität und ihren täglichen Gebrauch zu sprechen. Es handelt sich um ein Kooperationsprojekt der Universität Tübingen, der Asylbewerberaufnahmeeinrichtung Tübingen und dem Radio Micro-Europa. Um den sprachlichen Reichtum unserer Gäste zu entdecken, greifen wir auf eine Methode des sprachlichen Porträts zurück (Busch 2012, 2018). Ziel dieses Ansatzes ist es, die Beziehung eines Individuums zu seinen Sprachen grafisch darzustellen. Wir verwenden Farben, um Erfahrungen, Emotionen und Zugehörigkeiten auszudrücken. Wir werden sehen, wie diese Methode die Komplexität der Mehrsprachigkeit in Kontexten aufzeigen kann, in denen Sprachen zwischen Geschichte, Politik und Identität verflochten sind

Prediction of altered gait patterns by neuro-musculoskeletal simulations in the early stage of spastic paraplegia

In neurodegenerative motor disorders, the impaired interaction among the nervous system, muscles, the human skeleton, and the environment can impact locomotion. Changes in walking patterns are directly associated with a decreased quality of life and social engagement. The gait alterations serve as indicators to determine the progression and severity of a disease, holding significance for both, patients and healthcare providers. The selection of effective therapy for maintaining or restoring gait requires the consideration of the interdependencies between neuronal impairments and gait changes. Understanding these dependencies is challenging given that the control of movements results from this complex and dynamic interplay of the central and peripheral nervous system, the musculoskeletal system, and the environment. Neuro-musculoskeletal models offer a way to investigate these interactions in a human-like simulated system. Digital gait recordings of healthy and impaired participants can be used to verify the plausibility of the predicted gait patterns by the neuro-musculoskeletal model. The purpose of this work was to investigate and predict the gait in a neurodegenerative motor disorder causing spasticity and muscle weakness, namely hereditary spastic paraplegia. Of particular interest was the very early phase of the disease, before participants and clinicians experienced any noticeable gait alterations, as it is the most promising for therapeutic interventions. We call this phase the prodromal stage. To achieve this goal, we conducted gait analysis experiments with prodromal hereditary spastic paraplegia participants. We used walking patterns as a functional outcome measure and linked it to physiological alterations in the neuro-muscular control to predict the gait deviations in a neuro-musculoskeletal model. This work focuses on understanding the natural history of hereditary spastic paraplegia from the very beginning. Studying the emergence of spastic gait patterns may help to maintain norm-like walking patterns through early therapeutic interventions. The first goal was to find specific and disease-related gait alterations already in the prodromal stage that can be used as functional outcome measures to describe disease severity and progression. In an experimental study, we included 70 participants in the prodromal stage, manifest stage, or healthy controls. All participants underwent an instrumented digital gait analysis in a movement laboratory with high-precision camera measurements. The analysis was carried out using two paths. First, gait features were analyzed considering a priori knowledge about the disease with an in-depth analysis of spatiotemporal gait trajectories. Second, a neural network was trained to learn gait alterations that are decisive for the prodromal and manifest stages of hereditary spastic paraplegia. We found specific gait changes that occurred already in the prodromal stage and increased in more severe stages of the disease. Using convolutional neural networks to learn decisive gait features, we found more specific gait alterations in manifest patients. Therefore, we could describe the severity in the prodromal and early manifest stages in an objective and physiologically plausible way. The decisive features were further analyzed toward their predictive capability to monitor longitudinal change in the prodromal phase. We analyzed a two-year follow-up assessment and proved the severity-related gait features as still valid after the two-year progression for the same participants. For the same gait features, we found a significant longitudinal change in gait characteristics toward the gait patterns of manifest patients. We conclude that gait patterns can be used as functional outcome measures for future clinical trials. The second goal of this work was to link these altered walking patterns to the impaired motor control processes in hereditary spastic paraplegia. We used computer simulations using neuro-musculoskeletal models. By gradually increasing disease-related symptoms (spasticity and muscle weakness), we could predict kinematic and muscular changes comparable to the recorded gait patterns of prodromal and manifest participants. With the gradual increase of these parameters, we could reproduce the severity of the disease by mapping altered sensory-motor control parameters to the severity-related kinematic changes. The overall results show that gait patterns can be used as decisive and functional outcome measures for future therapeutic interventions already in the prodromal stage of hereditary spastic paraplegia. Using neuro-musculoskeletal models to predict and evaluate patient-relevant parameters, may be used to select effective therapies or predict relevant outcome measures for clinical trials