Metabolic changes in summer active and anuric hibernating free-ranging brown bears (ursus arctos)

The brown bear (Ursus arctos) hibernates for 5 to 6 months each winter and during this time ingests no food or water and remains anuric and inactive. Despite these extreme conditions, bears do not develop azotemia and preserve their muscle and bone strength. To date most renal studies have been limited to small numbers of bears, often in captive environments. Sixteen free-ranging bears were darted and had blood drawn both during hibernation in winter and summer. Samples were collected for measurement of creatinine and urea, markers of inflammation, the calcium-phosphate axis, and nutritional parameters including amino acids. In winter the bear serum creatinine increased 2.5 fold despite a 2-fold decrease in urea, indicating a remarkable ability to recycle urea nitrogen during hibernation. During hibernation serum calcium remained constant despite a decrease in serum phosphate and a rise in FGF23 levels. Despite prolonged inactivity and reduced renal function, inflammation does not ensue and bears seem to have enhanced antioxidant defense mechanisms during hibernation. Nutrition parameters showed high fat stores, preserved amino acids and mild hyperglycemia during hibernation. While total, essential, non-essential and branched chain amino acids concentrations do not change during hibernation anorexia, changes in individual amino acids ornithine, citrulline and arginine indicate an active, although reduced urea cycle and nitrogen recycling to proteins. Serum uric acid and serum fructose levels were elevated in summer and changes between seasons were positively correlated. Further studies to understand how bears can prevent the development of uremia despite minimal renal function during hibernation could provide new therapeutic avenues for the treatment of human kidney disease

Power Distribution and Propulsion System for an All-Electric Short-Range Commuter Aircraft—A Case Study

To participate in the transition towards a sustainable use of energy, the aircraft sector needs to be transformed with respect to the energy carrier and propulsion methods. For smaller aircraft, a battery-electric approach is promising. While this will require extensive research and design together with the application of advanced components which are partly not available to this date, general design rules and key parameters and critical components can already be deduced. This publication presents the example design of the full propulsion system for a small commuter aircraft. This serves as a case study to highlight the influence of components and parameters on the overall efficiency and weight of the system. By that, future research can be directed towards the areas of high impact on the realization of all-electric aircraft. A optimization of several motor variants, inverter topologies and power supply grid parameters is performed. The weight of the fully electric propulsion system is dominated by the battery. Therefore, all subsequent components need to be designed towards a high efficiency in opposition to high power density

Die Flugzeuge von morgen : Energieeffizientes und nachhaltiges Fliegen

[no abstract available

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2023/24:Catalytic receptors

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2023/24 is the sixth in this series of biennial publications. The Concise Guide provides concise overviews, mostly in tabular format, of the key properties of approximately 1800 drug targets, and nearly 6000 interactions with about 3900 ligands. There is an emphasis on selective pharmacology (where available), plus links to the open access knowledgebase source of drug targets and their ligands (https://www.guidetopharmacology.org/), which provides more detailed views of target and ligand properties. Although the Concise Guide constitutes almost 500 pages, the material presented is substantially reduced compared to information and links presented on the website. It provides a permanent, citable, point-in-time record that will survive database updates. The full contents of this section can be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bph.16180. Catalytic receptors are one of the six major pharmacological targets into which the Guide is divided, with the others being: G protein-coupled receptors, ion channels, nuclear hormone receptors, enzymes and transporters. These are presented with nomenclature guidance and summary information on the best available pharmacological tools, alongside key references and suggestions for further reading. The landscape format of the Concise Guide is designed to facilitate comparison of related targets from material contemporary to mid-2023, and supersedes data presented in the 2021/22, 2019/20, 2017/18, 2015/16 and 2013/14 Concise Guides and previous Guides to Receptors and Channels. It is produced in close conjunction with the Nomenclature and Standards Committee of the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (NC-IUPHAR), therefore, providing official IUPHAR classification and nomenclature for human drug targets, where appropriate.</p

THE CONCISE GUIDE TO PHARMACOLOGY 2021/22: Catalytic receptors.

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2021/22 is the fifth in this series of biennial publications. The Concise Guide provides concise overviews, mostly in tabular format, of the key properties of nearly 1900 human drug targets with an emphasis on selective pharmacology (where available), plus links to the open access knowledgebase source of drug targets and their ligands (www.guidetopharmacology.org), which provides more detailed views of target and ligand properties. Although the Concise Guide constitutes over 500 pages, the material presented is substantially reduced compared to information and links presented on the website. It provides a permanent, citable, point-in-time record that will survive database updates. The full contents of this section can be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/bph.15541. Catalytic receptors are one of the six major pharmacological targets into which the Guide is divided, with the others being: G protein-coupled receptors, ion channels, nuclear hormone receptors, enzymes and transporters. These are presented with nomenclature guidance and summary information on the best available pharmacological tools, alongside key references and suggestions for further reading. The landscape format of the Concise Guide is designed to facilitate comparison of related targets from material contemporary to mid-2021, and supersedes data presented in the 2019/20, 2017/18, 2015/16 and 2013/14 Concise Guides and previous Guides to Receptors and Channels. It is produced in close conjunction with the Nomenclature and Standards Committee of the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (NC-IUPHAR), therefore, providing official IUPHAR classification and nomenclature for human drug targets, where appropriate

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Abstracts from the 8th International Conference on cGMP Generators, Effectors and Therapeutic Implications

This work was supported by a restricted research grant of Bayer AG

On dispersive interactions between a trapped ion and a cavity field

Die vorliegende Dissertation enthält im ersten Teil die Charakterisierung eines Experimentaufbaus zur Hohlraumresonator-Quantenelektrodynamik, bestehend aus einer linearen Paul-Falle für 40Ca+-Ionen und einem Fabry-Perot-Resonator. In diesem Aufbau wurde das im zweiten Teil der Arbeit beschriebene Experiment durchgeführt: Ein nicht-resonant (dispersiv)an den Resonator gekoppeltes Ion wurde verwendet, um durch Ramsey-Spektroskopie des Ions Informationen über die Photonenstatistik des elektrischen Felds des gepumpten Resonators zu erhalten, ohne die Photonen zu zerstören. Die auf der AC-Stark-Verschiebung beruhende Phasenverschiebung sowie die Dephasierung, die das Ion durch den Einfluss der Photonen im Resonatorfeld erfährt, wurden im Ramseysignal beobachtet. Aus diesem Signal wurde durch Kalibrierung der Photonenanzahl im Resonator einerseits die Kopplungsstärke zwischen Ion und Resonatorfeld bestimmt. Andererseits wurde über einen Maximum-Likelihood-Algorithmus die statistische Verteilung der Photonenzahlen aus dem Ramseysignal rekonstruiert. Diese Rekonstruktion gelang sowohl für kohärentes Pumplicht, als auch für Licht mit gemischt thermisch-kohärenter Statistik. Es handelt sich bei diesem Experiment um die erste Übertragung von Konzepten, die bereits mit Rydbergatomen und supraleitenden Quantenbits in Mikrowellenresonatoren erfolgreich angewendet worden sind, auf ein System mit einem Resonator für optische Photonen.The first part of this dissertation describes the rebuilding and characterisation of an experimental setup on cavity quantum electrodynamics, which consists of a linear Paul trap for 40Ca+-ions and a Fabry-Perot cavity. This setup was used in the experiment, which is described in the second part of the thesis: Via non-resonant (dispersive) coupling between the resonator and an ion, information about the photon statistics of the field of the driven resonator was obtained in a Ramsey sequence without destroying the photons. Both the AC-Stark shift and dephasing experienced by the ion due to the influence of photons in the resonator field were observed in the Ramsey signal. From this signal the coupling strength between ion and resonator field was extracted via a calibration of the photon number. Furthermore, the statistical distribution of photon numbers was reconstructed from the Ramsey signal by means of a maximum likelihood algorithm. This reconstruction performed successfully both when the cavity was driven with coherent light as well as with light of mixed thermal-coherent statistics. The presented experiment demonstrates the first transfer to the optical domain of successfully tested concepts from experiments with Rydberg atoms and superconducting quantum bits in microwave resonators.vorgelegt von Dipl.-Phys. Konstantin FriebeAbweichender Titel laut Übersetzung des VerfassersZusammenfassung in deutscher SpracheUniversität Innsbruck, Dissertation, 2018OeBB(VLID)295079