Quantitative Untersuchungen über den Speicherungsmechanismus von Rhodamin B, Eosin und Neutralrot in Hefezellen

Die quantitative Messung der Farbstoffspeicherung von Modellsubstanzen und Hefezellen in Abhängigkeit von der CH zeigen bei den drei untersuchten Farbstoffen Rhodamin B, Eosin und Neutralrot, daß die elektrische Ladung von Adsorbens und Adsorptiv eine ausschlaggebende Rolle beim Zustandekommen einer Speicherung spielt. Die Speicherungskurven der Farbstoffe Rhodamin B und Neutralrot für Hefezellen weisen eine eigenartige Feinstruktur auf, die als Ausdruck einer plasmatischen Zustandsänderung aufzufassen ist. Die früher gefundene Verschiebung des IEP der Hefezellen nach dem Abtöten konnte neuerdings bestätigt werden. Unter Zugrundelegung der untersuchten Dissoziationsverhältnisse des Neutralrots wird eine Erklärung für Speicherungsmechanismus dieses Farbstoffes im Plasma und in der Vakuole gegeben wobei gleichzeitig die Ursachen der Vakuolenkontraktion gedeutet werden. Auf den methodischen Wert dieser Erkenntnisse für zellphysiologische Untersuchungen wird hingewiesen. Neutralrot zeigt in seinen optischen Eigenschaften eine enge Verwandt-schaft mit Acridinorange. Die kataphoretischen Untersuchungen an gefärbten und un-gefärbten Hefezellen bestätigen die bereits früher gegebene Auffassung der weitgehen-den Beeinflussung des elektrischen Zustandes des Adsorbens durch die Anfärbung

Next Generation Business Ecosystems: Engineering Decentralized Markets, Self-Sovereign Identities and Tokenization

Digital transformation research increasingly shifts from studying information systems within organizations towards adopting an ecosystem perspective, where multiple actors co-create value. While digital platforms have become a ubiquitous phenomenon in consumer-facing industries, organizations remain cautious about fully embracing the ecosystem concept and sharing data with external partners. Concerns about the market power of platform orchestrators and ongoing discussions on privacy, individual empowerment, and digital sovereignty further complicate the widespread adoption of business ecosystems, particularly in the European Union. In this context, technological innovations in Web3, including blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies, have emerged as potential catalysts for disrupting centralized gatekeepers and enabling a strategic shift towards user-centric, privacy-oriented next-generation business ecosystems. However, existing research efforts focus on decentralizing interactions through distributed network topologies and open protocols lack theoretical convergence, resulting in a fragmented and complex landscape that inadequately addresses the challenges organizations face when transitioning to an ecosystem strategy that harnesses the potential of disintermediation. To address these gaps and successfully engineer next-generation business ecosystems, a comprehensive approach is needed that encompasses the technical design, economic models, and socio-technical dynamics. This dissertation aims to contribute to this endeavor by exploring the implications of Web3 technologies on digital innovation and transformation paths. Drawing on a combination of qualitative and quantitative research, it makes three overarching contributions: First, a conceptual perspective on \u27tokenization\u27 in markets clarifies its ambiguity and provides a unified understanding of the role in ecosystems. This perspective includes frameworks on: (a) technological; (b) economic; and (c) governance aspects of tokenization. Second, a design perspective on \u27decentralized marketplaces\u27 highlights the need for an integrated understanding of micro-structures, business structures, and IT infrastructures in blockchain-enabled marketplaces. This perspective includes: (a) an explorative literature review on design factors; (b) case studies and insights from practitioners to develop requirements and design principles; and (c) a design science project with an interface design prototype of blockchain-enabled marketplaces. Third, an economic perspective on \u27self-sovereign identities\u27 (SSI) as micro-structural elements of decentralized markets. This perspective includes: (a) value creation mechanisms and business aspects of strategic alliances governing SSI ecosystems; (b) business model characteristics adopted by organizations leveraging SSI; and (c) business model archetypes and a framework for SSI ecosystem engineering efforts. The dissertation concludes by discussing limitations as well as outlining potential avenues for future research. These include, amongst others, exploring the challenges of ecosystem bootstrapping in the absence of intermediaries, examining the make-or-join decision in ecosystem emergence, addressing the multidimensional complexity of Web3-enabled ecosystems, investigating incentive mechanisms for inter-organizational collaboration, understanding the role of trust in decentralized environments, and exploring varying degrees of decentralization with potential transition pathways

Performance Management by Causal Mapping: An Application Field of Knowledge Management

As implied by the performance management (PM) concept, modern corporate management has to focus on cause-and-effect relationships underlying a firm´s financial performance generation. To determine the causes of financially desirable effects, subject-bound experiences and knowledge of employees, called tacit knowledge, should be realised. For this, knowledge management (KM) offers various elicitation techniques to reveal corporate-specific success factors (SFs) of financial performance generation from the corporate experts´ implicit knowledge. The identified factors have to be organised within a network of cause-and-effect relationships. In this framework, PM can apply the instrument of mapping to structure the individually revealed knowledge, to aggregate and visualise it for the entire company. For a valid representation of the causal relationships, the subjective bias arising within the mentioned process has to be minimised. In the literature, a variety of mapping methods can be found that differ in their approaches and their level of significance. As such a method, causal mapping will be presented in this paper. For providing intersubjectivity, the decision-making trail and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) as a multi-criteria approach will be debated in the context of mapping as a research field

Who Pays for Sustainability? An Analysis of Sustainability-Linked Bonds

We examine the novel phenomenon of sustainability-linked bonds (SLBs). These bonds’ coupon is linked to the issuer achieving a predetermined sustainability performance target. We estimate the yield differential between SLBs and non-sustainable counterfactuals by matching bonds from the same issuer. Our results show that in most cases investors pay for the improvement in sustainability, while issuers benefit from a sustainability premium. Our analysis suggests that the sustainability premium is larger for bonds with a higher coupon step-up and for callable bonds. We also show that there is a ‘free lunch’ for some SLB issuers, as their financial savings are higher than the potential penalty, and they have a call option to reduce this penalty. While our findings suggest that most SLBs incentivize sustainability improvements by offering a lower cost of capital, some companies that do not benefit from a sustainability premium seem to issue SLBs to signal their commitment to sustainability targets. The ‘free lunch’ however suggests that SLBs can also be a form of greenwashing, when they are issued purely for financial optimization without a real commitment to carry out sustainability improvements

Lithium recovery from geothermal brine – an investigation into the desorption of lithium ions using manganese oxide adsorbents

Spinel type lithium manganese oxides (LMOs) are promising adsorption materials for selective recovery of lithium from salty brines. In this work a lithium-ion sieve material, H$_{1.6}$Mn$_{1.6}$O$_{4}$, derived from Li$_{1.6}$Mn$_{1.6}$O$_{4}$4, a spinel type LMO, was successfully prepared via hydrothermal synthesis. This lithium-ion sieve, H$_{1.6}$Mn$_{1.6}$O$_{4}$, was then used in laboratory tests to adsorb Li+ from a generic LiCl solution and geothermal brine from Bruchsal geothermal power plant. Desorption experiments were performed with the following desorption solutions: ammonium peroxydisulfate ((NH$_{4}$)$_{2}$S$_{2}$O$_{8}$), sodium peroxydisulfate (Na$_{2}$S$_{2}$O$_{8}$), acetic acid (CH$_{3}$COOH), sulfuric acid (H$_{2}$SO$_{4}$), carbonic acid (H$_{2}$CO$_{3}$), ascorbic (C$_{6}$H$_{8}$O$_{6}$) and hydrochloric acid (HCl). The results showed that C$_{6}$H$_{8}$O$_{6}$ led to adsorbent destruction and only small amount of lithium was desorbed with H$_{2}$CO$_{3}$. CH$_{3}$COOH and (NH$_{4}$)$_{2}$S$_{2}$O$_{8}$ showed the best desorption performance with high lithium recovery and low Mn dissolution. The kinetic experiments indicate that more than 90% of equilibrium was reached after 4 hours. A decline in the adsorption/desorption capacity was measured for all desorption agents after eight cycles in the long-term experiments. These long-term tests revealed that higher lithium recovery in desorption with HCl and CH$_{3}$COOH was achieved compared to (NH$_{4}$)$_{2}$S$_{2}$O$_{8}$. On the other hand, the use of CH$_{3}$COOH and (NH$_{4}$)$_{2}$S$_{2}$O$_{8}$ seems to be advantageous to HCl because of lower Mn dissolution. According to the XRD results, the spinel structure of the treated adsorbents was preserved, but a weakening of the peak intensity was observed. Analyzing the adsorbent composition after eight cycles, an accumulation of competing ions was observed. This was especially remarkable when acetic acid was used