Weiterentwicklung von Berufen - Herausforderungen für die Berufsbildungsforschung

Berufe sind das wesentliche Strukturmerkmal der Erstausbildung von Fachkräften in Deutschland. Ihre Genese und Adaption an neue Anforderungen ist der Gegenstand der beruflichen Ordnungsarbeit. [...] Die Berufsbildungsforschung befasst sich im Nachgang mit Fragen der beruflichen Didaktik, des Wissenstransfers in die berufliche Praxis und der Qualität der Ausbildung. [...] Dabei stellt sich hier eine besondere Herausforderung: Wenn Berufe von Verbänden, Gewerkschaften und von der Berufsbildungspolitik quasi ausgehandelt werden, dann werden zwar die Interessen der vertretenen Gruppen, möglicherweise aber nicht immer die prospektiven Anforderungen des Beschäftigungssystems getroffen. [...] Wie kann die Berufsbildungsforschung mit ihrer Expertise und mit ihren Verfahren und Instrumenten dazu beitragen, dass die Ordnungsarbeit auf einer verlässlichen empirischen Grundlage stattfindet und absehbare Kompetenzanforderungen berücksichtigt? Wie kann sie Entscheidungsgrundlagen für interessegeleitete Ordnungsverfahren schaffen? Und schließlich: Ist sie in Kooperation mit anderen Disziplinen in der Lage, sich entwickelnde Anforderungen an Inhalte und Zuschnitte von Berufen, den Bedarf an neuen Berufen und die Obsoleszenz bestehender Berufe zu antizipieren? (DIPF/Orig.

Integration of Biological Sources: Exploring the Case of Protein Homology

Data integration is a key issue in the domain of bioin- formatics, which deals with huge amounts of heteroge- neous biological data that grows and changes rapidly. This paper serves as an introduction in the field of bioinformatics and the biological concepts it deals with, and an exploration of the integration problems a bioinformatics scientist faces. We examine ProGMap, an integrated protein homology system used by bioin- formatics scientists at Wageningen University, and several use cases related to protein homology. A key issue we identify is the huge manual effort required to unify source databases into a single resource. Un- certain databases are able to contain several possi- ble worlds, and it has been proposed that they can be used to significantly reduce initial integration efforts. We propose several directions for future work where uncertain databases can be applied to bioinformatics, with the goal of furthering the cause of bioinformatics integration

Predicting the Impact of Alternative Splicing on Plant MADS Domain Protein Function

Several genome-wide studies demonstrated that alternative splicing (AS) significantly increases the transcriptome complexity in plants. However, the impact of AS on the functional diversity of proteins is difficult to assess using genome-wide approaches. The availability of detailed sequence annotations for specific genes and gene families allows for a more detailed assessment of the potential effect of AS on their function. One example is the plant MADS-domain transcription factor family, members of which interact to form protein complexes that function in transcription regulation. Here, we perform an in silico analysis of the potential impact of AS on the protein-protein interaction capabilities of MIKC-type MADS-domain proteins. We first confirmed the expression of transcript isoforms resulting from predicted AS events. Expressed transcript isoforms were considered functional if they were likely to be translated and if their corresponding AS events either had an effect on predicted dimerisation motifs or occurred in regions known to be involved in multimeric complex formation, or otherwise, if their effect was conserved in different species. Nine out of twelve MIKC MADS-box genes predicted to produce multiple protein isoforms harbored putative functional AS events according to those criteria. AS events with conserved effects were only found at the borders of or within the K-box domain. We illustrate how AS can contribute to the evolution of interaction networks through an example of selective inclusion of a recently evolved interaction motif in the MADS AFFECTING FLOWERING1-3 (MAF1–3) subclade. Furthermore, we demonstrate the potential effect of an AS event in SHORT VEGETATIVE PHASE (SVP), resulting in the deletion of a short sequence stretch including a predicted interaction motif, by overexpression of the fully spliced and the alternatively spliced SVP transcripts. For most of the AS events we were able to formulate hypotheses about the potential impact on the interaction capabilities of the encoded MIKC protein

Automated alignment-based curation of gene models in filamentous fungi

BACKGROUND: Automated gene-calling is still an error-prone process, particularly for the highly plastic genomes of fungal species. Improvement through quality control and manual curation of gene models is a time-consuming process that requires skilled biologists and is only marginally performed. The wealth of available fungal genomes has not yet been exploited by an automated method that applies quality control of gene models in order to obtain more accurate genome annotations. RESULTS: We provide a novel method named alignment-based fungal gene prediction (ABFGP) that is particularly suitable for plastic genomes like those of fungi. It can assess gene models on a gene-by-gene basis making use of informant gene loci. Its performance was benchmarked on 6,965 gene models confirmed by full-length unigenes from ten different fungi. 79.4% of all gene models were correctly predicted by ABFGP. It improves the output of ab initio gene prediction software due to a higher sensitivity and precision for all gene model components. Applicability of the method was shown by revisiting the annotations of six different fungi, using gene loci from up to 29 fungal genomes as informants. Between 7,231 and 8,337 genes were assessed by ABFGP and for each genome between 1,724 and 3,505 gene model revisions were proposed. The reliability of the proposed gene models is assessed by an a posteriori introspection procedure of each intron and exon in the multiple gene model alignment. The total number and type of proposed gene model revisions in the six fungal genomes is correlated to the quality of the genome assembly, and to sequencing strategies used in the sequencing centre, highlighting different types of errors in different annotation pipelines. The ABFGP method is particularly successful in discovering sequence errors and/or disruptive mutations causing truncated and erroneous gene models. CONCLUSIONS: The ABFGP method is an accurate and fully automated quality control method for fungal gene catalogues that can be easily implemented into existing annotation pipelines. With the exponential release of new genomes, the ABFGP method will help decreasing the number of gene models that require additional manual curation

Determining the crystal-field ground state in rare earth Heavy Fermion materials using soft-x-ray absorption spectroscopy

We infer that soft-x-ray absorption spectroscopy is a versatile method for the determination of the crystal-field ground state symmetry of rare earth Heavy Fermion systems, complementing neutron scattering. Using realistic and universal parameters, we provide a theoretical mapping between the polarization dependence of Ce $M_{4,5}$ spectra and the charge distribution of the Ce $4f$ states. The experimental resolution can be orders of magnitude larger than the $4f$ crystal field splitting itself. To demonstrate the experimental feasibility of the method, we investigated CePd$_2$Si$_2$, thereby settling an existing disagreement about its crystal-field ground state

CeRu4_4Sn6_6: a strongly correlated material with nontrivial topology

Topological insulators form a novel state of matter that provides new opportunities to create unique quantum phenomena. While the materials used so far are based on semiconductors, recent theoretical studies predict that also strongly correlated systems can show non-trivial topological properties, thereby allowing even the emergence of surface phenomena that are not possible with topological band insulators. From a practical point of view, it is also expected that strong correlations will reduce the disturbing impact of defects or impurities, and at the same increase the Fermi velocities of the topological surface states. The challenge is now to discover such correlated materials. Here, using advanced x-ray spectroscopies in combination with band structure calculations, we infer that CeRu$_4$Sn$_6$ is a strongly correlated material with non-trivial topology.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Scientific Report

Short-range antiferromagnetic correlations in Kondo insulators

We study the influence of short range antiferromagnetic correlations between local $f$-electrons on the transport and thermodynamic properties of Kondo insulators, as first proposed by Coqblin et al. for metallic heavy fermions. The inter-site magnetic correlations produce an effective bandwidth for the $f$-electrons. They are treated on the same footing as the local Kondo correlations such that two energy scales appear in our approach. We discuss the competition between these two scales on the physical properties.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures. To be published in Physics Letters

Slow crossover in YbXCu4 intermediate valence compounds

We compare the results of measurements of the magnetic susceptibility Chi(T), the linear coefficient of specific heat Gamma(T)=C(T)/T and 4f occupation number nf(T) for the intermediate valence compounds YbXCu4 (X = Ag, Cd, In, Mg, Tl, Zn) to the predictions of the Anderson impurity model, calculated in the non-crossing approximation (NCA). The crossover from the low temperature Fermi liquid state to the high temperature local moment state is substantially slower in the compounds than predicted by the NCA; this corresponds to the ''protracted screening'' recently predicted for the Anderson Lattice. We present results for the dynamic susceptibility, measured through neutron scattering experiments, to show that the deviations between theory and experiment are not due to crystal field effects, and we present x-ray-absorption fine-structure (XAFS) results that show the local crystal structure around the X atoms is well ordered, so that the deviations probably do not arise from Kondo Disorder. The deviations may correlate with the background conduction electron density, as predicted for protracted screening.Comment: Submitted to Physical Review B on June 7, 2000, accepted for publication November 2, 2000. Changes to the original manuscript include: 1) a discussion of the relation of the slow crossover to the conduction electron density; 2) a discussion of the relation of the reported results to earlier photoemission results; and, 3) minor editorial change

Assessing the impact of alternative splicing on the diversity and evolution of the proteome in plants

Splicing is one of the key processing steps during the maturation of a gene’s primary transcript into the mRNA molecule used as a template for protein production. Splicing involves the removal of segments called introns and re-joining of the remaining segments called exons. It is by now well established that not always the same segments are removed from a gene’s primary transcript during the splicing process. The consequence of this splicing variation, termed Alternative Splicing (AS), is that multiple distinct mature mRNA molecules can be produced from a single gene. One of the two biological roles that are ascribed to AS is that of a mechanism which enables an organism to produce multiple functionally distinct proteins from a single gene. Alternatively, AS can serve as a means for controlling gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. Although many clear examples have been reported for both roles, the extent to which AS increases the functional diversity of the proteome, regulates gene expression or simply reflects noise in splicing machinery is not well known. Determining the full functional impact of AS by designing and performing wet-lab experiments for all AS events is unfeasible and bioinformatics approaches have therefore widely been used for studying the impact of AS at a genome-wide scale. In this thesis four bioinformatics studies are presented that were aimed at determining the extent to which AS is used in plants as a mechanism for producing multiple distinct functional proteins from a single gene. Each chapter uses a different method for analyzing specific properties of AS. Under the premise that functional genetic features are more likely to be conserved than non-functional ones, AS events that are present in two or more species are more likely to be biologically relevant than those that are confined to a single species. In chapter 2 we analyzed the conservation of AS by performing a comparative analysis between three divergent plant species. The results of that study indicated that the vast majority of AS events does not persist over long periods of evolution. We concluded, based on this lack of conservation, that AS only has a limited impact on the functional diversity of the proteome in plants. Following this conclusion, it can hypothesized that the variation that AS induces at the transcriptome level is not likely to be manifested at the protein level. In chapter 3 we tested this hypothesis by analyzing two independent proteomics datasets. This type of data can be used to directly identify proteins present in a biological sample. Our results indicated that the variation induced by AS at the transcriptome level is also manifested at the protein level. We concluded that either many AS events have a confined species-specific (not conserved) function or simply produce protein variants that are stable enough to escape rapid turn-over. Another method for determining whether AS increases the functional diversity of the proteome is by determining whether protein sequence variations that are typically induced by AS are common within the plant kingdom. We found (chapter 4) that this is not the case in plants and concluded that novel functions do not frequently arise through AS. We also found that most of the AS-induced variation is lost, similarly as for redundant gene copies, within a very short evolutionary time period. One limitation of genome-wide analyses is that these capture only the more general patterns. However, the functional impact of AS can be very different in different genes or gene-families. In order fully assess the functional impact of AS, it is therefore important to also study the process within the functional context of individual genes or gene families. In chapter 5 we demonstrated this concept by performing a detailed analysis of AS within the MADS-box gene family. We were able to provide clues as to how AS might impact the protein-protein interaction capabilities of individual MADS proteins. Some of our predictions were supported by experimental evidence. We further showed how AS can serve as an evolutionary mechanism for experimenting with novel functions (novel interactions) without the explicit loss of existing functions. The overall conclusion, based on the performed analyses is as follows: AS primarily is a consequence of noise in the splicing machinery and results in an increased diversity of the proteome. However, only a small fraction of the proteins resulting from AS will have beneficial functions and are subsequently selected for during evolution. The large remaining fraction is, similarly as for redundant gene-copies, lost within a very short evolutionary time period after its emergence. </p