Venerable Tradition or Reprehensible Luxury? A Scandal about Processional Display in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco

 A conflict within the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in 1540 concerning the display for the annual procession of Corpus Domini shows clearly that in those years of religious discussion and reformation many members of the scuole grandi were seized by the same wish for religious renewal as Alessandro Caravia, who was to publish Il sogno dil Caravia with its well-known trenchant criticism of the scuole grandi in the following year. The then renowned lawyer Girolamo Gigante played a decisive role in this conflict

Bildungswert und Living History

van Norden J. Bildungswert und Living History. In: Eschwege K, Köster G, Lippok J, Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg, eds. Living History - Lernen im historischen Gewand. Jubiläumsschrift zum 25-jährigen Bestehen der historischen Spielstadt "Megedeborch" im Kulturhistorischen Museum Magdeburg. Magdeburger Museumsschriften. Vol 22. 1st ed. Magdeburg: Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg; 2023: 25-31

Gardens4Science: Setting Up a Trusted Network for German Botanic Gardens Using Open Source Technologies

Botanic gardens are an invaluable refuge for plant diversity for conservation, education and research. Worldwide, they manage over 100,000 species, roughly 30% of all plant species diversity, and over 41% of known threatened species; the botanic gardens in Germany house approximately 50,000 different species (Marquardt et al. in press). Scientists in need of plant material rely upon these resources for their research; they require a pooled, up-to-date inventory of ideally all accessions of these gardens. Sharing data from (living) specimen collections online has become routine in the past years; initiatives like PlantSearch of Botanic Gardens Conservation International and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) allow requesting specimens of interest. However, these catalogues are accessible for everyone. Legitimate concerns about potential theft and legal issues keep curators of living collections from sharing their full catalogues; in most cases, only filtered views of the data will be fed into these networks. Gardens4Science (http://gardens4science.biocase.org) aims at overcoming this issue by creating a trusted network between botanic gardens that allows an unfiltered access on the constituents’ accession catalogues. This unified data pool needs to be automatically synchronized with the individual garden’s catalogues, irrespective of the collection management systems used locally. For the three-year construction phase of Gardens4Science, focus is on Cactaceae and Bromeliaceae, since these families are well-represented in the collections and ideal models for studying the origin of biodiversity on evolutionary time scale. Gardens4Science’s technical architecture (Fig. 1) is based on existing tools for setting up biodiversity networks: The BioCASe (Biological Collections Access Service) Provider Software acts as an interface to the local databases that shields the network from their peculiarities (database management systems and data models used). BioCASe transforms the data into the Access to Biological Collections Data schema (ABCD) and publishes them as a BioCASe-compliant web service (Holetschek and Döring 2008, Holetschek et al. 2012). The data portal is based on portal software from the Global Genome Biodiversity Network and provides a user-specific view on the data. Registered trusted users will be able to display full details of individual accessions, whereas guest users will see only an aggregated view (Droege et al. 2014). The Berlin Indexing and Harvesting Toolkit (B-HIT) is used for harvesting the BioCASe web services of the local catalogues and creating a unified index database (Kelbert et al. 2015). Harvesting is done in regular intervals in order to keep the index in sync with the source databases and does not require any action on the provider’s side. In addition to harvesting, B-HIT performs several data cleaning steps. Foremost, it reconciles scientific names from the source databases with a taxonomic backbone (currently caryophyllales.org for Cactaceae and the Butcher and Gouda checklist for Bromeliaceae), which allows harmonizing the taxonomies from the different sources and the correction of outdated species names and orthographic mistakes. Provenance information are validated (for example specified geographic coordinates versus country) and corrected, if possible; date values are parsed and converted into a standard format. The issues found and potential corrections are compiled in reports and send to the curators, so the mistakes can be rectified in the source databases. In the construction phase, Gardens4Science consists of seven German Botanic gardens that share their accessions of the Bromeliaceae and Cactaceae families. Up to now (March 2019), 19.539 records have been published in Evo-BoGa, with about 3,500 to be added until the end of the project in January 2020. After the construction phase, it is planned to extend the network to include more Botanic Gardens – both from Germany and other countries – as well as additional plant families

Effects of an Antagonistic Analog of Growth Hormone-Releasing Hormone on Endometriosis in a Mouse Model and In Vitro

Endometriosis is a benign gynecologic disorder causing dysmenorrhea, pelvic pain, and subfertility. Receptors for the growth hormone-releasing hormone (GHRH) were found in endometriotic tissues. Antagonists of GHRH have been used to inhibit the growth of endometriotic endometrial stromal cells. In this study, the GHRH receptor splice variant (SV) 1 was detected in human endometrial tissue samples by Western blots and quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). The highest messenger RNA (mRNA) and protein levels of SV1 were found in eutopic endometrium from patients with endometriosis compared to ectopic endometriotic tissues and endometrium from normal patients. The highest expression for GHRH mRNA was found by qRT-PCR in ectopic endometriosis lesions. In an in vivo mouse model with human endometrial explants from patients with endometriosis, 10 μg MIA-602 per day resulted in significantly smaller human endometrial xenotransplants after 4 weeks compared to mice treated with vehicle. The endometrial tissues expressed SV1 before and after xenotransplantation. The proliferation of endometrial stromal cells as well as the endometriosis cell lines 12-Z and 49-Z was decreased by exposure to 1 μM MIA-602 after 72 hours. The protein levels of epithelial growth factor receptors in 12-Z and 49-Z cell lines were reduced 48 and 72 hours after the administration of 1 μM MIA-602. MIA-602 decreased the activation of the MAP-kinases ERK-1/2. Our study demonstrates the presence of SV1 receptor as a target for treatment with GHRH antagonist in endometriosis. Endometrial tissues respond to MIA-602 with inhibition of proliferation in vitro and in vivo. The use of MIA-602 could be an effective supplement to the treatment strategies in endometriosis

Nuclear structure studies of neutron-rich Cu and Zn isotopes produced by means of proton-induced fission of 238^{238}U

NESTERInternational audienceThe neutron-rich nuclei $^{72}$Ni and $^{72}$Cu have been produced in the proton-induced fission of $^{238}$U at the LISOL and ISOLDE facilities of Louvain-La-Neuve and CERN. Partial beta-decay schemes are presented, giving some information about the nuclear structure of their daughter nuclei $^{72}$Cu and $^{72}$Zn. The lifetime of $^{72}$Cu was determined to be $T_1/2$ = 6.63(3) s, in line with previous measurements. No $\beta$-decaying isomeric states were identified in $^{72}$Cu, in contrast to $^{70}$Cu. The spin and the parity of several states in $^{72}$Cu are tentatively assigned and a comparison is made with different shell-model predictions