Biologic effects of light: An enlighting prospective

During the past several decades our knowledge on the effects of light on human health and its underlying mechanisms has been expanded exponentially. These findings have led to an enormous scientific progress including new concepts for prevention and treatment of many diseases such as autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular disease, skin cancer and other malignancies. To summarize our present knowledge on this topic and to stimulate new research initiatives, an international symposium entitled Biologic Effects of Light, that was organized by J. Reichrath, Th. Vogt and M.F. Holick, and that was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), was held June 11/12, 2015 in Homburg/Saar, Germany. This meeting was specially designed to offer scientists and clinicians a platform to discuss the latest developments in this intriguing research area. Plenary and Keynote lectures as well as Round Table Discussions gave an update on carefully selected hot topics, including Vitamin D, skin cancer prevention, UVA radiation and cellular homeostasis, photocarcinogenesis, and photochemical internalization (PCI). Some of the relevant findings and conclusions of this meeting are published in this issue of Anticancer Research (1-13) and can be summarized as follows

Endothelial Progenitor Cells as Biomarkers of Cardiovascular Pathologies: A Narrative Review

Endothelial progenitor cells (EPC) may influence the integrity and stability of the vascular endothelium. The association of an altered total EPC number and function with cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and risk factors (CVF) was discussed; however, their role and applicability as biomarkers for clinical purposes have not yet been defined. Endothelial dysfunction is one of the key mechanisms in CVD. The assessment of endothelial dysfunction in vivo remains a major challenge, especially for a clinical evaluation of the need for therapeutic interventions or for primary prevention of CVD. One of the main challenges is the heterogeneity of this particular cell population. Endothelial cells (EC) can become senescent, and the majority of circulating endothelial cells (CEC) show evidence of apoptosis or necrosis. There are a few viable CECs that have properties similar to those of an endothelial progenitor cell. To use EPC levels as a biomarker for vascular function and cumulative cardiovascular risk, a correct definition of their phenotype, as well as an update on the clinical application and practicability of current isolation methods, are an urgent priority. Keywords: biomarker; cardiovascular disease; endothelial cells; progenitor

Endothelial Progenitor Cells as Biomarkers of Cardiovascular Pathologies: A Narrative Review

Endothelial progenitor cells (EPC) may influence the integrity and stability of the vascular endothelium. The association of an altered total EPC number and function with cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and risk factors (CVF) was discussed; however, their role and applicability as biomarkers for clinical purposes have not yet been defined. Endothelial dysfunction is one of the key mechanisms in CVD. The assessment of endothelial dysfunction in vivo remains a major challenge, especially for a clinical evaluation of the need for therapeutic interventions or for primary prevention of CVD. One of the main challenges is the heterogeneity of this particular cell population. Endothelial cells (EC) can become senescent, and the majority of circulating endothelial cells (CEC) show evidence of apoptosis or necrosis. There are a few viable CECs that have properties similar to those of an endothelial progenitor cell. To use EPC levels as a biomarker for vascular function and cumulative cardiovascular risk, a correct definition of their phenotype, as well as an update on the clinical application and practicability of current isolation methods, are an urgent priority

Church and piety in the market town Karlstadt am Main in the bishopric of Würzburg from the late middle ages till the end of the 30 years war (1400 till 1648)

Die Arbeit setzt sich aus kirchenhistorischer Sicht mit dem Phänomen „Kirche und Stadt“ im Spätmittelalter und der frühen Neuzeit auseinander. Dabei steht jedoch keine Residenz- oder Reichsstadt, sondern eine fränkische Landstadt im Mittelpunkt des Interesses. In die Untersuchung werden sämtliche Äußerungen des kirchlichen wie auch des volksfrommen Lebens, die aus den Quellen hervortreten oder durch Realien erschlossen werden können, einbezogen. Forschungsgegenstand sind dabei sämtliche bürgerliche Stiftungen, wie eben die Benefizien sowie die weniger aufwändigen Jahrtage und die weiteren liturgischen oder paraliturgischen Fundationen, aber auch das bürgerliche Engagement beim Bau und Unterhalt der Kirchen und Kapellen. Untrennbar mit dem religiösen Engagement ist jenes verbunden, das aus unseren heutigen Sicht explizit sozialen Charakter hat, im Mittelalter aber aus der Jenseitsvorsorge erwuchs. Im gesamten Untersuchungszeitraum ist somit eine Unterscheidung nach sozialen und religiösen Gesichtspunkten unzulässig, weshalb jene im Folgenden auch unterbleiben wird. Daneben treten aus den Quellen immer wieder Informationen hervor, die Rückschlüsse auf die Frömmigkeit des einzelnen zulassen, diese werden hier ebenso wiedergegeben. Es wird für die einzelnen Abschnitte des Untersuchungszeitraumes jeweils eine gleich strukturierte Gliederung angewandt. Aufgrund des gleich lautenden Fragekataloges können somit Brüche, Veränderungen und Entwicklungen, aber auch eventuelle Kontinuitäten über die Jahrhunderte hinweg herausgearbeitet werden. Die Kirchengebäude als die Realien für Liturgie und Frömmigkeit schlechthin stehen jeweils am Anfang, darauf folgen die Pfarrer und für die Zeit nach 1573 - soweit vorhanden - auch Angaben zum Pfarrhaus und die Pfarrpfründe. Waren doch die einzelnen Pfarrer die Vertreter der kirchlichen Obrigkeit vor Ort, sie spiegeln in idealtypischer Weise das Priesterbild ihrer Zeit wieder. Die Errichtung von Vikarien wiederum führte zu einem Ausbau des geistlichen Elementes in der Stadt, das jedoch an einer Schnittstelle zur bürgerlichen Gemeinde angesiedelt war, wie die Patronate des Stadtrates über die Vikarien deutlich machen. Auf jene folgen dann sämtliche weiteren bürgerlichen Stiftungen im kirchlichen Raum, deren erster Zweck in den allermeisten Fällen die Jenseitsvorsorge war und unter denen daher zahlenmäßig die Jahrtage überwiegen. Aus den unterschiedlichsten Quellen wie auch durch die Realien lässt sich zudem ein jeweils mehr oder weniger vollständiges Bild der Liturgie und Frömmigkeit gewinnen. Die abschließend aufgeführten Studenten sowie deren Studienorte ermöglichen Rückschlüsse auf den Bildungsgrad vor Ort sowie die Beziehungen der Stadt in weiter entfernte Regionen. Die Zahl der Priesterweihen wie auch die Personen, die das Amt eines Prädikanten übernahmen, lassen wiederum auf den Zustand des religiösen Lebens in der Stadt schließen. Dieses Gliederungsschema wurde wesentlich im dritten Kapitel durch den Punkt 6 „Evangelische in Karlstadt“ unterbrochen wie auch im darauf folgenden vierten Kapitel durch den Punkt 6 „Echtersche Reform 1585/86“. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt somit den Ausbau der kirchlichen Strukturen bis hin zu den Jahrzehnten der Glaubensspaltung und die darauf folgende Ära der katholischen Reform bis zum Beginn des Barockzeitalters. Im 15. Jahrhundert konnten die kirchlichen Strukturen in Karlstadt nämlich wesentlich ausgebaut werden, dies hielt bis in das 16. Jahrhundert hinein an. Daher wurde der Beginn des Untersuchungszeitraumes auf das Jahr 1400 festgelegt. In den Jahren nach 1525 kam es in Folge zu einer Stagnation des kirchlichen Lebens, wenn nicht sogar zu einem Verfall! In der regionalen Geschichtsschreibung gilt das Episkopat des Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn als eine Phase der Wiederbelebung der kirchlichen Strukturen wie des religiösen Lebens allgemein. Um zu klären, ob dies wirklich der Fall war und die damals ergriffenen Maßnahmen auch nachhaltig wirkten, wurde das Ende des Untersuchungszeitraumes mit dem Ende des 30jährigen Krieges im Jahre 1648 gleichgesetzt. Es ergaben sich somit vier große Zeitabschnitte für die vorliegende Untersuchung: 1400 bis 1525, 1526 bis 1572, 1573 bis 1617 und 1618 bis 1648. Vor allem das Jahr des Bauernkrieges 1525 ist hier lediglich als „terminus post quem“ angesetzt, nicht als eigentliche Schwelle zu Neuem. Die Wahl Karlstadts für die Untersuchung hat zunächst nicht nur biografische Gründe, da ich dort geboren wurde. Darüber hinaus jedoch weitaus wichtiger ist, dass Karlstadt zu den bedeutendsten Orten des Hochstiftes Würzburg gehörte und somit eine spezifisch städtische Struktur ausbilden konnte. Die Stadt stand daher unter der Herrschaft des Fürstbischofs, während das Domkapitel lange Zeit das Patronat über die Pfarrei besaß. Somit agierten in Karlstadt die beiden wichtigsten Kräfte des Hochstiftes parallel nebeneinander.This treatise deals with the relationship of church and town in the late middle ages and early modern times out of sight of church history. However the interest goes to a Franconian market town not a residential or free imperial city. The examination makes use of all sorts of expressions of ecclesiastical and religious life, which can be found in written sources in archives or be traced back by the means of objects. In the centre of research are all civic foundations as benefices as well as the less elaborate masses for the dead and further liturgical and pseudo-liturgical foundations. Furthermore the commitment of the citizens regarding the building and maintenance of the churches and chapels is researched into. The engagement which has a more social character can´t be separated from the religious one in the middle ages because it resulted out of the care for the hereafter. In the whole period this research spans there is no such thing like a separation of social and religious affairs. Besides that the sources reveal informations about the religious life of single persons every now and again. There will be always the same structure for the single paragraphs of the treatise: The church buildings as the one and only subjects of liturgy and piety stand at the beginning. They are followed by the parish priests and after 1573 – as far as they are - by informations about the presbitery and the benefice itself. This is because the parish priests were the local representatives of the religious authorities. Thus they reflect the idea of the priestly ideal of their own times. The foundation of benefices lead to a strengthening of the religious element in town, which however was embedded in a strong civic element as can be seen by the patronage of the municipal council. The single benefices developed out of confraternities however they are named first as they were more structured than these. Then further civic foundations with a religious character follow because they were mostly meant as a care for the hereafter. They were mainly masses for the dead. Out of the different sources and by the help of objects we can get a more or less complete picture of liturgy and piety. Finally the lists of students and universities give an insight into the grade of literaricy in town as well as into the contacts between home and abroad. The numbers of persons ordained to priests or becoming preachers give us a clue about the state of religious life in town. This structure was left in the third chapter as point 6 „Protestants in Karlstadt“ was added as well as in the fourth chapter were point 6 „Reform by Echter 1585/86“ came in. The treatise spans around 250 years and thus comprises the late middle ages and early modern times, if one wants to mark epochs. So this dissertation does describe the rise of the ecclesiastical structures up to the decades of the reformation and the following era of the catholic reform till the beginning of the Baroque age. The ecclesiastical structures were strongly built up in the 15th century which lasted till the beginning of the 16th. This is why the start was fixed with the year 1400. In the years after 1525 religious life stagnated or even deteriorated! Local history sees the time of prince bishop Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn (1573-1617) as a turning point in reviving structures of church and religious life. In order to find out about the true nature of his time the end of the treatise is set by the year 1648, the end of the thirty years war. So we have four big eras: 1400 till 1525, 1526 till 1572, 1573 till 1617 and 1618 till 1648. Especially the year of the peasant revolt, 1525, is merely a „terminus post quem“, which means it is be no means a step into a new era! The choice of Karlstadt for this dissertation is first of all for biographical reasons because I was born there. Furthermore and more important Karlstadt was one of the most important places in the bishopric of Würzburg and thus had developed specific civic structures. The town was under the rule of the prince bishop, while the cathedral chapter had the patronage of the parish for a very long time. So the two main powers of the bishopric took actions in Karlstadt side by side

Classification of large graphs by a local tree decomposition

We present a binary graph classifier (BGC) which allows to classify large, unweighted, undirected graphs. This classifier is based on a local decomposition of the graph for each node in generalized trees. The obtained trees, forming the tree set of the graph, are then pairwise compared by a generalized treesimilarity- algorithm (GTSA) and the resulting similarity scores determine a characteristic similarity distribution of the graph. Classification in this context is defined as mutual consistency for all pure and mixed tree sets and their resulting similarity distributions in a graph class. We demonstrate the application of this method to an artificially generated data set and for data from microarray experiments of cervical cancer

Towards Clustering of Web-based Document Structures

Methods for organizing web data into groups in order to analyze web-based hypertext data and facilitate data availability are very important in terms of the number of documents available online. Thereby, the task of clustering web-based document structures has many applications, e.g., improving information retrieval on the web, better understanding of user navigation behavior, improving web users requests servicing, and increasing web information accessibility. In this paper we investigate a new approach for clustering web-based hypertexts on the basis of their graph structures. The hypertexts will be represented as so called generalized trees which are more general than usual directed rooted trees, e.g., DOM-Trees. As a important preprocessing step we measure the structural similarity between the generalized trees on the basis of a similarity measure d. Then, we apply agglomerative clustering to the obtained similarity matrix in order to create clusters of hypertext graph patterns representing navigation structures. In the present paper we will run our approach on a data set of hypertext structures and obtain good results in Web Structure Mining. Furthermore we outline the application of our approach in Web Usage Mining as future work