The Shine-Through Masking Paradigm Is a Potential Endophenotype of Schizophrenia

BACKGROUND: To understand the genetics of schizophrenia, a hunt for so-called intermediate phenotypes or endophenotypes is ongoing. Visual masking has been proposed to be such an endophenotype. However, no systematic study has been conducted yet to prove this claim. Here, we present the first study showing that masking meets the most important criteria for an endophenotype. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We tested 62 schizophrenic patients, 39 non-affected first-degree relatives, and 38 healthy controls in the shine-through masking paradigm and, in addition, in the Continuous Performance Test (CPT) and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). Most importantly, masking performance of relatives was significantly in between the one of patients and controls in the shine-through paradigm. Moreover, deficits were stable throughout one year. Using receiver operating characteristics (ROC) methods, we show that the shine-through paradigm distinguishes with high sensitivity and specificity between schizophrenic patients, first-order relatives and healthy controls. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The shine-through paradigm is a potential endophenotype

Beiträge zur Geschichte des Landkreises Regensburg 30

Marginalien von 14 Autoren; darin: Hecht, Otto: Die Altstraße Regensburg-Landshut (auf dem Gebiet des Landkreises ) (S.2); Hecht, Otto: Die erste urkundliche Erwähnung des Bäumel-Hofes in Obertraubling (S. 5); Böck, Emmi / Herzog, Hans / Doerfler, Heinrich: Drei Sagen bzw. Sagengestalten aus dem Regensburger Süden (S. 6); Motyka, Gustl: Mittelalterliches Geleit von Hemau nach Regensburg (S. 9); Strehler, Heinz: Haus Nr. 21 in Matting - eines der ältesten Häuser Bayerns (S. 10); Zink, Wendelin: Die Wasserburg Haidau vor 200 Jahren (S. 11); Färber, Konrad M.: Ein Augenblick europäischer Geschichte (S. 12); Fendl, Josef: Fünf Säcke Brot für Tegernheim (S. 14); Bäumel, Xaver: Ein Lehrer der "schlechtesten Schule im ganzen Königreich" (S. 18); Rösch, Georg: 600 Jahre Hofgeschichte Kleinkiefenholz (S. 22); Deininger, Leonhard: Mit 3,3 Millionen nachts unterwegs (S. 24); Zausinger, Ludwig: Ein Nachtrag zum Heimatbuch "Thalmassing" (S. 26); Forster, Fritz: Beim Korea-Wirt (S. 28); Fendl, Josef: Neutraubling - Choppertown (S. 20

tum-ens/urbs: v0.7

Maintenance: Model file urbs.py split into subfiles in folder urbs Feature: Usable area in site implemented as possible constraint Feature: Plot function (and get_timeseries) now support grouping of multiple sites Feature: Environmental commodity costs (e.g. emission taxes or other pollution externalities) Bugfix: column Overproduction in report sheet did not respect DS

Parallelised online biomass monitoring in shake flasks enables efficient strain and carbon source dependent growth characterisation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Background: Baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as one of the most often used workhorses in biotechnology has been developed into a huge family of application optimised strains in the last decades. Increasing numbers of strains render their characterisation highly challenging, even with the simple methods of growth-based analytics. Here we present a new sensor system for the automated, non-invasive and parallelisable monitoring of biomass in continuously shaken shake flask cultures, called CGQ (“cell growth quantifier”). The CGQ implements a dynamic approach of backscattered light measurement, allowing for efficient and accurate growth-based strain characterisation, as exemplarily demonstrated for the four most commonly used laboratory and industrial yeast strains, BY4741, W303-1A, CEN.PK2-1C and Ethanol Red. Results: Growth experiments revealed distinct carbon source utilisation differences between the investigated S. cerevisiae strains. Phenomena such as diauxic shifts, morphological changes and oxygen limitations were clearly observable in the growth curves. A strictly monotonic non-linear correlation of OD600 and the CGQ’s backscattered light intensities was found, with strain-to-strain as well as growth-phase related differences. The CGQ measurements showed high resolution, sensitivity and smoothness even below an OD600 of 0.2 and were furthermore characterised by low background noise and signal drift in combination with high reproducibility. Conclusions: With the CGQ, shake flask fermentations can be automatically monitored regarding biomass and growth rates with high resolution and parallelisation. This makes the CGQ a valuable tool for growth-based strain characterisation and development. The exceptionally high resolution allows for the identification of distinct metabolic differences and shifts as well as for morphologic changes. Applications that will benefit from that kind of automatized biomass monitoring include, amongst many others, the characterization of deregulated native or integrated heterologous pathways, the fast detection of co-fermentation as well as the realisation of rational and growth-data driven evolutionary engineering approaches

No Evidence for a Common Factor Underlying Visual Abilities in Healthy Older People

The world's population is aging at an increasing rate. Even in the absence of neurodegenerative disorders, healthy aging affects perception and cognition. In the context of cognition, common factors are well established. Much less is known about common factors for vision. Here, we tested 92 healthy older and 104 healthy younger participants in 19 visual tests (including visual search and contrast sensitivity) and three cognitive tests (including verbal fluency and digit span). Unsurprisingly, younger participants performed better than older participants in almost all tests. Surprisingly, however, the performance of older participants was mostly uncorrelated between visual tests, and we found no evidence for a common factor