Methodological problems with evaluating change efficiency

Motivation: Changes result from a turbulent environment and internal situation of an organization. Rarely do changes happen spontaneously, usually they stem from decisions consciously shaped and taken by the management. Both the reasons as well as consequences of changes appear on multiple grounds and areas, often strongly interrelated. This leads to far-reaching consequences, mainly difficulties in practical operations as well as consequences for studies, analyses and related scientific generalizations and the conclusion-drawing process in both domains.Aim: Purpose of this article is to present and make a critical analysis of the existing achievements in the area of evaluating change efficiency, and indicate opportunities and difficulties in formulating new, in particular synthetic, indicators of change efficiency. Methodology applied in this paper is deductive and based on collected data and their critical analysis.Results: Managers need synthetic measures that are hard to develop. Various methods may be used in order to do it, starting from simple and complex point scales and ending up with methods applied in other sciences, e.g. the Geneva method or its variations applied to evaluate the standard of living and development. Still this requires the isolation of main analytical measures, their upper and lower thresholds, in subsequent change or process areas, and the application of statistical methods to calculate change status or effect. Such action requires longer change planning and preparation, readiness on the part of the managerial staff, and continuous monitoring with active participation of leaders and change managers

The Issue of Poland’s Dependence on Natural Gas Supplies from the Russian Federation in the Political Thought of Piotr Naimski: Selected Problems

The topic of the research was the political thought of Piotr Naimski in the field of reducing Poland’s dependence on natural gas supplies from the Russian Federation. The aim of the article was therefore to analyse Naimski’s views on the diversification of the sources and directions of natural gas supplies to Poland and to define the political concepts formulated by this politician. The article indicates Naimski’s views on increasing Poland’s energy security by realizing energy projects such as LNG terminal, Baltic Pipe gas pipeline, as well as activities aimed at counteracting the Russian Federation energy policy in Central Europe. Naimski was one of the staunchest opponents of the construction of Russian-German gas pipelines (Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2)

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Integration and analysis of phenotypic data from functional screens

Motivation: Although various high-throughput technologies provide a lot of valuable information, each of them is giving an insight into different aspects of cellular activity and each has its own limitations. Thus, a complete and systematic understanding of the cellular machinery can be achieved only by a combined analysis of results coming from different approaches. However, methods and tools for integration and analysis of heterogenous biological data still have to be developed. Results: This work presents systemic analysis of basic cellular processes, i.e. cell viability and cell cycle, as well as embryonic stem cell pluripotency and differentiation. These phenomena were studied using several high-throughput technologies, whose combined results were analysed with existing and novel clustering and hit selection algorithms. This thesis also introduces two novel data management and data analysis tools. The first, called DSViewer, is a database application designed for integrating and querying results coming from various genome-wide experiments. The second, named PhenoFam, is an application performing gene set enrichment analysis by employing structural and functional information on families of protein domains as annotation terms. Both programs are accessible through a web interface. Conclusions: Eventually, investigations presented in this work provide the research community with novel and markedly improved repertoire of computational tools and methods that facilitate the systematic analysis of accumulated information obtained from high-throughput studies into novel biological insights

Identification of genes preventing transgenerational transmission of stress-induced epigenetic states.

Examples of transgenerational transmission of environmentally induced epigenetic traits remain rare and disputed. Abiotic stress can release the transcription of epigenetically suppressed transposons and, noticeably, this activation is only transient. Therefore, it is likely that mechanisms countering the mitotic and meiotic inheritance of stress-triggered chromatin changes must exist but are undefined. To reveal these mechanisms, we screened for Arabidopsis mutants impaired in the resetting of stress-induced loss of epigenetic silencing and found that two chromatin regulators, Decrease in DNA methylation1 (DDM1) and Morpheus' Molecule1 (MOM1), act redundantly to restore prestress state and thus erase "epigenetic stress memory". In ddm1 mutants, stress hyperactivates heterochromatic transcription and transcription persists longer than in the wild type. However, this newly acquired state is not transmitted to the progeny. Strikingly, although stress-induced transcription in mom1 mutants is as rapidly silenced as in wild type, in ddm1 mom1 double mutants, transcriptional signatures of stress are able to persist and are found in the progeny of plants stressed as small seedlings. Our results reveal an important, previously unidentified function of DDM1 and MOM1 in rapid resetting of stress induced epigenetic states, and therefore also in preventing their mitotic propagation and transgenerational inheritance.This work was supported by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation (31003A-125005), the European Commission through the AENEAS collaborative project (FP7 226477), the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, and the European Research Council.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from PNAS via http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.140227511

Contribution of the arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis to heavy metal phytoremediation

High concentrations of heavy metals (HM) in the soil have detrimental effects on ecosystems and are a risk to human health as they can enter the food chain via agricultural products or contaminated drinking water. Phytoremediation, a sustainable and inexpensive technology based on the removal of pollutants from the environment by plants, is becoming an increasingly important objective in plant research. However, as phytoremediation is a slow process, improvement of efficiency and thus increased stabilization or removal of HMs from soils is an important goal. Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi provide an attractive system to advance plant-based environmental clean-up. During symbiotic interaction the hyphal network functionally extends the root system of their hosts. Thus, plants in symbiosis with AM fungi have the potential to take up HM from an enlarged soil volume. In this review, we summarize current knowledge about the contribution of the AM symbiosis to phytoremediation of heavy metal

DNA methylation and epigenetic inheritance during plant gametogenesis

In plants, newly acquired epigenetic states of transcriptional gene activity are readily transmitted to the progeny. This is in contrast to mammals, where only rare cases of transgenerational inheritance of new epigenetic traits have been reported (FASEB J 12:949-957, 1998; Nat Genet 23:314-318, 1999; Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 100:2538-2543, 2003). Epigenetic inheritance in plants seems to rely on cytosine methylation maintained through meiosis and postmeiotic mitoses, giving rise to gametophytes. In particular, maintenance of CpG methylation (mCpG) appears to play a central role, guiding the distribution of other epigenetic signals such as histone H3 methylation and non-CpG DNA methylation. The evolutionarily conserved DNA methyltransferase MET1 is responsible for copying mCpG patterns through DNA replication in the gametophytic phase. The importance of gametophytic MET1 activity is illustrated by the phenotypes of met1 mutants that are severely compromised in the accuracy of epigenetic inheritance during gametogenesis. This includes elimination of imprinting at paternally silent loci such as FWA or MEDEA (MEA). The importance of DNA methylation in gametophytic imprinting has been reinforced by the discovery of DEMETER (DME), encoding putative DNA glycosylase involved in the removal of mC. DME opposes transcriptional silencing associated with imprinting activities of the MEA/FIE polycomb group comple