30 Jahre Biosphärenreservat Mittelelbe : Bericht über die Festveranstaltung am 19. Oktober 2009 im Bauhaus Dessau

Als vor 30 Jahren, am 24. November 1979, eine Kommission der UNESCO in der DDR weilte, ereignete sich eine deutsche Premiere, eher unbemerkt von der breiten Öffentlichkeit: An der Mittleren Elbe und im Thüringer Wald erkannte das Gremium zwei naturräumlich äußerst wertvolle Schutzgebiete als erste deutsche UNESCO-Biosphärenreservate an. Die Erfolgsgeschichte dieser Schutzkategorie in Deutschland begründete sich mit diesem Tag. Das Biosphärenreservat Mittelelbe feierte sein 30-jähriges Jubiläum mit einer Festveranstaltung im Bauhaus Dessau

Dr. Gerda Bräuer erhält die Ehrennadel des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt

Landespolitik und -verwaltung zollen Frau Dr. Gerda Bräuer Respekt und Anerkennung für jahrzehntelanges unermüdliches Engagement in zahlreichen Ehrenämtern. Diese verfolgten stets das Ziel des Schutzes, der Entwicklung und der Bekanntmachung einer einzigartigen Kulturlandschaft an der Mittelelbe. Beruf und Berufung waren im Erwerbsleben von Gerda Bräuer stets eine wahrhaft gelebte Einheit. Die Liste ihrer mit überragender fachlicher Befähigung, Herzenswärme und Überzeugung ausgeübten Ehrenämter ist lang und ruft Interesse an jener Person wach, die sie allesamt ausfüllte und noch ausfüllt. Der Ministerpräsident des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt, Prof. Wolfgang Böhmer, überreichte Dr. Gerda Bräuer am Montag, den 16. August 2010 die Ehrennadel des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt

[Buchbesprechung:] Trenkner, D. unter Mitwirkung der Mitarbeiter der Biosphärenreservatsverwaltung Mittelelbe (2011): Schöne Wilde Welt – Das UNESCO-Biosphärenreservat Mittelelbe. – Naturreisen in Sachsen-Anhalt, Band 2

Ein naturnaher mitteleuropäischer Strom mit ebenso naturnahen Nebenflüssen und Altwassern, davon geprägte Natur- und Kulturlandschaften, beachtlicher Artenreichtum, große Städte, kleine Siedlungen, Welterbe in einmaliger Dichte und jede Menge Hinweise, wie sich das alles sinnvoll entdecken und verbinden lässt – das sind die Grundpfeiler zum Reiseführer „Schöne Wilde Welt – Das UNESCO-Biosphärenreservat Mittelelbe“

Toward a Transnational Information Ecology on the Right?:Hyperlink Networking among Right-Wing Digital News Sites in Europe and the United

The recent rise of a more transnationally networked political right across Europe and the United States has been accompanied by an emerging alternative digital news infrastructure through which information circulates and shared epistemologies are established. This paper examines the extent to which digital news sites on the right are interconnected within and across countries. It further explores which additional sites serve as transnationally shared reference points of such news ecology on a transnational scale. To do so, we investigate hyperlink networks between alternative right-wing online news sites (RNS) in six western democracies (Austria, Germany, United States, United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden). Our analysis draws on hyperlink data harvested from 65 RNS for three months in 2018. The results show that RNS do establish interlinked alternative right-wing news ecologies, as they connect to likeminded RNS within and across borders. Furthermore, we see substantial variation across countries, where RNS from countries with less established alternative right-wing news infrastructure are more likely to link transnationally to RNS. The United States represents an outlier in that it features the largest and domestically most integrated network of RNS, while U.S. sites function as hubs for transnational connections from European RNS. Apart from connections between RNS, we find that legacy news media are crucial transnationally shared reference points. We conclude that rather than presenting an insulated, alternative sphere, the emerging digital news ecology on the right seeks to link up to the broader information environment across borders

EIT Food - EU PRO4BAKE project: Improve artigianal bakeries performances considering both demand forecast and process optimisation: the EIT FOOD Pro4Bake approach

The bakery products subsector has the largest number of companies, value added, employees and numberof companies in Europe (Food and Drinks, 2011). Over-consumption of energy in bakeries due to inefficientscheduling and production planning together with high shares of unsold bread waste (5-10% in Europe) is abig issue. Not only avoidable CO2 emissions affecting climate change and society, but also excessive costsfor SME bakeries are severe consequences. Recently, the EU has identified the bakery sector as one of thetarget sectors to apply best environmental practices. The aim of the envisaged project is in line with thegoals of the EU (Regulation (EC) No 1221/2009, 2017/1508 of 28 August 2017 EU): minimising food wasteand reducing energy consumption.The Pro4Bake project aims to provide tools that could improve the bakery situation. A prospectiveproduction-planning tool for bakeries is being developed in this trans- and interdisciplinary project. Presentmachinery in bakeries is used to optimise the production process. The reduction of make span and idle timeof machines, but also combinations thereof will lead to a higher economic and ecologic efficiency, thus,lower production costs for bakeries and lower climate change impact for society. The tool is developedusing a flow-shop model, optimised by evolutionary algorithms, digital twins and artificial intelligenceprocedures. Adaptation to consumers’ preferences will minimise food waste; hence, ecological footprint inbakeries, and lead to further optimisation of the baking process, product range and amount. Consumers’demands and expectations related to e.g. weather or holidays, and their acceptance of changes in productavailability will play a significant role in the analysis. In the end, a computational application will help SMEbakeries as users to adapt their production planning and processes to best practice. Subsequently, itspotential in practical application will be examined and its impact broadened to the rest of Europe andbeyond. Dissemination through technology transfer to users by involving professionals, students andlearning videos will be performed. The product will be commercialised in the end to make it possible forbakeries to adapt to the truly needed amount and product range with optimised baking schedules toreduce energy consumption. The multidisciplinary approach, combining research optimisation methods anddemand forecast approach used could be easily transferred to other agri-food sectors

Common miRNA patterns of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease and their putative impact on commensal gut microbiota

With the rise of Next-Generation-Sequencing (NGS) methods, Micro-RNAs (miRNAs) have achieved an important position in the research landscape and have been found to present valuable diagnostic tools in various diseases such as multiple sclerosis or lung cancer. There is also emerging evidence that miRNAs play an important role in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or Parkinson’s disease (PD). Apparently, these diseases come along with changes in miRNA expression patterns which led to attempts from researchers to use these small RNA species from several body fluids for a better diagnosis and in order to observe disease progression. Additionally, it became evident that microbial commensals might play an important role for pathology development and were shown to have a significantly different composition in patients suffering from neurodegeneration compared with healthy controls. As it could recently be shown that secreted miRNAs are able to enter microbial organisms, it is conceivable that the host’s miRNA might affect the gut microbial ecosystem. As such, miRNAs may inherit a central role in shaping the “diseased microbiome” and thereby mutually act on the characteristics of these neurodegenerative diseases. We have therefore 1) compiled a list of miRNAs known to be associated with AD and/or PD, 2) performed an in silico target screen for binding sites of these miRNA on human gut metagenome sequences and 3) evaluated the hit list for interesting matches potentially relevant to the etiology of AD and or PD. The examination of protein identifiers connected to bacterial secretion system, lipopolysaccharide biosynthesis and biofilm formation revealed an overlap of 37 bacterial proteins that were targeted by human miRNAs. The identified links of miRNAs to the biological processes of bacteria connected to AD and PD have yet to be validated via in vivo experiments. However, our results show a promising new approach for understanding aspects of these neurodegenerative diseases in light of the regulation of the microbiome

Production of natural colorants by liquid fermentation with Chlorociboria aeruginascens and Laetiporus sulphureus and prospective applications

The replacement of potentially hazardous synthetic dyes with natural dyes and pigments are of great interest for a sustainable economy. In order to obtain cost-efficient, environmentally friendly and competitive products, improvements in the cultivation and extraction of pigment-producing organisms and in dyeing processes are necessary. In our study, we were able to scale up the production of xylindein by Chlorociboria aeruginascens from 3 to 70 L bioreactor cultivations. We have identified important bioprocess parameters like low shear stress (150 rpm, tip speed <0.5 m/s) for optimal pigment yield (4.8 mg/L/d). Additionally, we have demonstrated the potential of laetiporic acid production by Laetiporus sulphureus in various cultivation systems and media, achieving dried biomass concentrations of almost 10 g/L with a 7 L bioreactor cultivation after 17 days. Extractions performed at 70°C and 15 min incubation time showed optimal results. To the best of our knowledge, we have described for the first time the use of this pigment in silk dyeing, which results in a brilliant hue that cannot easily be produced by other natural pigments. © 2020 The Authors. Engineering in Life Sciences published by Wiley-VCH Gmb

A fast and intuitive method for calculating dynamic network reconfiguration and node flexibility

Dynamic interactions between brain regions, either during rest or performance of cognitive tasks, have been studied extensively using a wide variance of methods. Although some of these methods allow elegant mathematical interpretations of the data, they can easily become computationally expensive or difficult to interpret and compare between subjects or groups. Here, we propose an intuitive and computationally efficient method to measure dynamic reconfiguration of brain regions, also termed flexibility. Our flexibility measure is defined in relation to an a-priori set of biologically plausible brain modules (or networks) and does not rely on a stochastic data-driven module estimation, which, in turn, minimizes computational burden. The change of affiliation of brain regions over time with respect to these a-priori template modules is used as an indicator of brain network flexibility. We demonstrate that our proposed method yields highly similar patterns of whole-brain network reconfiguration (i.e., flexibility) during a working memory task as compared to a previous study that uses a data-driven, but computationally more expensive method. This result illustrates that the use of a fixed modular framework allows for valid, yet more efficient estimation of whole-brain flexibility, while the method additionally supports more fine-grained (e.g. node and group of nodes scale) flexibility analyses restricted to biologically plausible brain networks

Zfp296 Is a Novel, Pluripotent-Specific Reprogramming Factor

Expression of the four transcription factors Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc (OSKM) is sufficient to reprogram somatic cells into induced pluripotent stem (iPSCs). However, this process is slow and inefficient compared with the fusion of somatic cells with embryonic stem cells (ESCs), indicating that ESCs express additional factors that can enhance the efficiency of reprogramming. We had previously developed a method to detect and isolate early neural induction intermediates during the differentiation of mouse ESCs. Using the gene expression profiles of these intermediates, we identified 23 ESC-specific transcripts and tested each for the ability to enhance iPSC formation. Of the tested factors, zinc finger protein 296 (Zfp296) led to the largest increase in mouse iPSC formation. We confirmed that Zfp296 was specifically expressed in pluripotent stem cells and germ cells. Zfp296 in combination with OSKM induced iPSC formation earlier and more efficiently than OSKM alone. Through mouse chimera and teratoma formation, we demonstrated that the resultant iPSCs were pluripotent. We showed that Zfp296 activates transcription of the Oct4 gene via the germ cell–specific conserved region 4 (CR4), and when overexpressed in mouse ESCs leads to upregulation of Nanog expression and downregulation of the expression of differentiation markers, including Sox17, Eomes, and T, which is consistent with the observation that Zfp296 enhances the efficiency of reprogramming. In contrast, knockdown of Zfp296 in ESCs leads to the expression of differentiation markers. Finally, we demonstrated that expression of Zfp296 in ESCs inhibits, but does not block, differentiation into neural cells