Gregariousness, Interactive Jobs and Wages

Gregariousness is an important aspect of human life with implications for labour market outcomes. The paper examines, to the best of our knowledge for the first time for Germany, gregariousness and social interaction at the workplace and associated wage differentials. Our empirical findings with samples from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) demonstrate that gregarious people more often work in jobs with social interaction. Furthermore, females tend to work more often in interactive jobs compared to males. There is evidence that working in an interactive job is associated with a compensating negative wage differential of 7 percent for women and non for men. Implications for wage policy are discussed.Gregariousness, social interactions, labour markets, sorting, wage differentials

Gregariousness, interactive jobs and wages

Gregariousness is an important aspect of human life with implications for labour market outcomes. The paper examines, to the best of our knowledge for the first time for Germany, gregariousness and social interaction at the workplace and associated wage differentials. Our empirical findings with samples from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) demonstrate that gregarious people more often work in jobs with social interaction. Furthermore, females tend to work more often in interactive jobs compared to males. There is evidence that working in an interactive job is associated with a compensating negative wage differential of 7 percent for women and non for men. Implications for wage policy are discussed. --Gregariousness,social interactions,labour markets,sorting,wage differentials

Effects of Ischemia on Lung Macrophages

Angiogenesis after pulmonary ischemia is initiated by reactive O2 species and is dependent on CXC chemokine growth factors, and its magnitude is correlated with the number of lavaged macrophages. After complete obstruction of the left pulmonary artery in mice, the left lung is isolated from the peripheral circulation until 5–7 days later, when a new systemic vasculature invades the lung parenchyma. Consequently, this model offers a unique opportunity to study the differentiation and/or proliferation of monocyte-derived cells within the lung. In this study, we questioned whether macrophage subpopulations were differentially expressed and which subset contributed to growth factor release. We characterized the change in number of all macrophages (MHCII int, CD11C+), alveolar macrophages (MHCII int, CD11C+, CD11B−) and mature lung macrophages (MHCII int, CD11C+, CD11B+) in left lungs from mice immediately (0 h) or 24 h after left pulmonary artery ligation (LPAL). In left lung homogenates, only lung macrophages increased 24 h after LPAL (vs. 0 h; p<0.05). No changes in proliferation were seen in any subset by PCNA expression (0 h vs. 24 h lungs). When the number of monocytic cells was reduced with clodronate liposomes, systemic blood flow to the left lung 14 days after LPAL decreased by 42% (p<0.01) compared to vehicle controls. Furthermore, when alveolar macrophages and lung macrophages were sorted and studied in vitro, only lung macrophages secreted the chemokine MIP-2α (ELISA). These data suggest that ischemic stress within the lung contributes to the differentiation of immature monocytes to lung macrophages within the first 24 h after LPAL. Lung macrophages but not alveolar macrophages increase and secrete the proangiogenic chemokine MIP-2α. Overall, an increase in the number of lung macrophages appears to be critical for neovascularization in the lung, since clodronate treatment decreased their number and attenuated functional angiogenesis

OpenMS - A Framework for Quantitative HPLC/MS-Based Proteomics

In the talk we describe the freely available software library OpenMS which is currently under development at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Eberhardt-Karls Universität Tübingen. We give an overview of the goals and problems in differential proteomics with HPLC and then describe in detail the implemented approaches for signal processing, peak detection and data reduction currently employed in OpenMS. After this we describe methods to identify the differential expression of peptides and propose strategies to avoid MS/MS identification of peptides of interest. We give an overview of the capabilities and design principles of OpenMS and demonstrate its ease of use. Finally we describe projects in which OpenMS will be or was already deployed and thereby demonstrate its versatility

Fast Semantic Segmentation of RGB-D Scenes with GPU-Accelerated Deep Neural Networks

Abstract. In semantic scene segmentation, every pixel of an image is assigned a category label. This task can be made easier by incorporat-ing depth information, which structured light sensors provide. Depth, however, has very different properties from RGB image channels. In this paper, we present a novel method to provide depth information to convo-lutional neural networks. For this purpose, we apply a simplified version of the histogram of oriented depth (HOD) descriptor to the depth chan-nel. We evaluate the network on the challenging NYU Depth V2 dataset and show that with our method, we can reach competitive performance at a high frame rate

Biomechanical modulation of collagen fragment-induced anabolic and catabolic activities in chondrocyte/agarose constructs

The present study examined the effect of collagen fragments on anabolic and catabolic activities by chondrocyte/agarose constructs subjected to dynamic compression..

Bronchoepithelial Expression of CXCR1 and CXCR2 Does Not Facilitate Transepithelial Migration of Neutrophils

Background: Neutrophilic airway inflammation is one of the key features of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The chemokine receptors 1 (CXCR1) and 2 (CXCR2) are expressed in the bronchial mucosa during chronic inflammation and might be of importance for transepithelial migration of neutrophils. Objectives: This study addressed the role of bronchoepithelial CXCR1 and CXCR2 expression with respect to transepithelial migration of neutrophils. Methods: Primary bronchial epithelial cells (PBECs) derived from COPD patients and healthy controls as well as transiently CXCR1- and CXCR2-transfected Calu-6 cells were used for transepithelial migration assays of neutrophils under various conditions. Epithelial CXCR1 and CXCR2 expression was verified by means of flow cytometry. Results: Transepithelial migration of neutrophils was significantly increased following lipopolysaccharide pretreatment of epithelial cells. Transient transfection of CXCR1 and CXCR2 neither augmented the transepithelial migration of neutrophils, nor did the selective blockade of CXCR1 and CXCR2 have any significant effect on neutrophilic transepithelial migration. In addition, no differences were found in PBECs and neutrophils derived from healthy controls and COPD patients. Conclusions: The data of the present study do not support the hypothesis that bronchoepithelial expression of CXCR1 and/or CXCR2 facilitate transepithelial migration of neutrophils

Transgenerational Developmental Effects of Immune Priming in the Red Flour Beetle Tribolium castaneum

Immune priming, the increased chance to survive a secondary encounter with a pathogen, has been described for many invertebrate species, which lack the classical adaptive immune system of vertebrates. Priming can be specific even for closely related bacterial strains, last up to the entire lifespan of an individual, and in some species, it can also be transferred to the offspring and is then called transgenerational immune priming (TGIP). In the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum, a pest of stored grains, TGIP has even been shown to be transferred paternally after injection of adult beetles with heat-killed Bacillus thuringiensis. Here we studied whether TGIP in T. castaneum is also transferred to the second filial generation, whether it can also occur after oral and injection priming of larvae and whether it has effects on offspring development. We found that paternal priming with B. thuringiensis does not only protect the first but also the second offspring generation. Also, fitness costs of the immune priming became apparent, when the first filial generation produced fewer offspring. Furthermore, we used two different routes of exposure to prime larvae, either by injecting them with heat-killed bacteria or orally feeding them B. thuringiensis spore culture supernatant. Neither of the parental larval priming methods led to any direct benefits regarding offspring resistance. However, the injections slowed down development of the injected individuals, while oral priming with both a pathogenic and a non-pathogenic strain of B. thuringiensis delayed offspring development. The long-lasting transgenerational nature of immune priming and its impact on offspring development indicate that potentially underlying epigenetic modifications might be stable over several generations. Therefore, this form of phenotypic plasticity might impact pest control and should be considered when using products of bacterial origin against insects

OpenMS – An open-source software framework for mass spectrometry

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Mass spectrometry is an essential analytical technique for high-throughput analysis in proteomics and metabolomics. The development of new separation techniques, precise mass analyzers and experimental protocols is a very active field of research. This leads to more complex experimental setups yielding ever increasing amounts of data. Consequently, analysis of the data is currently often the bottleneck for experimental studies. Although software tools for many data analysis tasks are available today, they are often hard to combine with each other or not flexible enough to allow for rapid prototyping of a new analysis workflow.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We present OpenMS, a software framework for rapid application development in mass spectrometry. OpenMS has been designed to be portable, easy-to-use and robust while offering a rich functionality ranging from basic data structures to sophisticated algorithms for data analysis. This has already been demonstrated in several studies.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>OpenMS is available under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) from the project website at <url>http://www.openms.de</url>.</p