124 research outputs found
Der Weg aus der Krise
Thematisierung von Begleiterschinung depressiver Störungen sowie der Weiterentwicklung in suizidale Verhaltensweisen und deren Abwehr im Sinne von KriseninterventionenTheming of side-effects of depressive disorders and suicidal behaviors in the development and its defense in the sense of crisis interventio
Helping a crocodile to learn German plurals: Children’s online judgment of actual, potential and illegal plural forms
A substantial tradition of linguistic inquiry has framed the knowledge of native speakers in terms of their ability to determine the grammatical acceptability of language forms that they encounter for the first time. In the domain of morphology, the productivity framework of Dressler (CLASNET Working papers 7, 1997) has emphasized the importance of this ability in terms of the graded potentiality of non-existing multimorphemic forms. The goal of this study was to investigate what role the notion of potentiality plays in online lexical well-formedness judgment among children who are native speakers of Austrian German. A total of 114 children between the ages of six and ten and a total of 40 adults between the ages of 18 and 30 (as a comparison group) participated in an online well-formedness judgment task which focused on pluralized German nouns. Concrete, picturable, high frequency German nouns were presented in three pluralized forms: (a) actual existing plural form, (b) morphologically illegal plural form, (c) potential (but not existing) plural form. Participants were shown pictures of the nouns (as a set of three identical items) and simultaneously heard one of three pluralized forms for each noun. Response latency and judgment type served as dependent variables. Results indicate that both children and adults are sensitive to the distinction between illegal and potential forms (neither of which they would have encountered). For all participants, plural frequency (rather than frequency of the singular form) affected responses for both existing and non-existing words. Other factors increasing acceptability were the presence of supplementary umlaut in addition to suffixation and homophony with existing words or word forms
Rapid Sampling of Molecules via Skin for Diagnostic and Forensic Applications
Skin provides an excellent portal for diagnostic monitoring of a variety of entities; however, there is a dearth of reliable methods for patient-friendly sampling of skin constituents. This study describes the use of low-frequency ultrasound as a one-step methodology for rapid sampling of molecules from the skin.
Sampling was performed using a brief exposure of 20 kHz ultrasound to skin in the presence of a sampling fluid. In vitro sampling from porcine skin was performed to assess the effectiveness of the method and its ability to sample drugs and endogenous epidermal biomolecules from the skin. Dermal presence of an antifungal drug—fluconazole and an abused substance, cocaine—was assessed in rats.
Ultrasonic sampling captured the native profile of various naturally occurring moisturizing factors in skin. A high sampling efficiency (79 ± 13%) of topically delivered drug was achieved. Ultrasound consistently sampled greater amounts of drug from the skin compared to tape stripping. Ultrasonic sampling also detected sustained presence of cocaine in rat skin for up to 7 days as compared to its rapid disappearance from the urine.
Ultrasonic sampling provides significant advantages including enhanced sampling from deeper layers of skin and high temporal sampling sensitivity
A systematic analysis of the effects of increasing degrees of serum immunodepletion in terms of depth of coverage and other key aspects in top-down and bottom-up proteomic analyses
Immunodepletion of clinical fluids to overcome the dominance by a few very abundant proteins has been explored but studies are few, commonly examining only limited aspects with one analytical platform. We have systematically compared immunodepletion of 6, 14, or 20 proteins using serum from renal transplant patients, analysing reproducibility, depth of coverage, efficiency, and specificity using 2-D DIGE (‘top-down’) and LC-MS/MS (‘bottom-up’). A progressive increase in protein number (≥2 unique peptides) was found from 159 in unfractionated serum to 301 following 20 protein depletion using a relatively high-throughput 1-D-LC-MS/MS approach, including known biomarkers and moderate–lower abundance proteins such as NGAL and cytokine/growth factor receptors. On the contrary, readout by 2-D DIGE demonstrated good reproducibility of immunodepletion, but additional proteins seen tended to be isoforms of existing proteins. Depletion of 14 or 20 proteins followed by LC-MS/MS showed excellent reproducibility of proteins detected and a significant overlap between columns. Using label-free analysis, greater run-to-run variability was seen with the Prot20 column compared with the MARS14 column (median %CVs of 30.9 versus 18.2%, respectively) and a corresponding wider precision profile for the Prot20. These results illustrate the potential of immunodepletion followed by 1-D nano-LC-LTQ Orbitrap Velos analysis in a moderate through-put biomarker discovery process
High Abundance Proteins Depletion vs Low Abundance Proteins Enrichment: Comparison of Methods to Reduce the Plasma Proteome Complexity
BACKGROUND:
To date, the complexity of the plasma proteome exceeds the analytical capacity of conventional approaches to isolate lower abundance proteins that may prove to be informative biomarkers. Only complex multistep separation strategies have been able to detect a substantial number of low abundance proteins (<100 ng/ml). The first step of these protocols is generally the depletion of high abundance proteins by the use of immunoaffinity columns or, alternatively, the enrichment of by the use of solid phase hexapeptides ligand libraries.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:
Here we present a direct comparison of these two approaches. Following either approach, the plasma sample was further fractionated by SCX chromatography and analyzed by RP-LC-MS/MS with a Q-TOF mass spectrometer. The depletion of the 20 most abundant plasma proteins allowed the identification of about 25% more proteins than those detectable following low abundance proteins enrichment. The two datasets are partially overlapping and the identified proteins belong to the same order of magnitude in terms of plasma concentration.
CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE:
Our results show that the two approaches give complementary results. However, the enrichment of low abundance proteins has the great advantage of obtaining much larger amount of material that can be used for further fractionations and analyses and emerges also as a cheaper and technically simpler approach. Collectively, these data indicate that the enrichment approach seems more suitable as the first stage of a complex multi-step fractionation protocol
DIGE Proteome Analysis Reveals Suitability of Ischemic Cardiac In Vitro Model for Studying Cellular Response to Acute Ischemia and Regeneration
Proteomic analysis of myocardial tissue from patient population is suited to yield insights into cellular and molecular mechanisms taking place in cardiovascular diseases. However, it has been limited by small sized biopsies and complicated by high variances between patients. Therefore, there is a high demand for suitable model systems with the capability to simulate ischemic and cardiotoxic effects in vitro, under defined conditions. In this context, we established an in vitro ischemia/reperfusion cardiac disease model based on the contractile HL-1 cell line. To identify pathways involved in the cellular alterations induced by ischemia and thereby defining disease-specific biomarkers and potential target structures for new drug candidates we used fluorescence 2D-difference gel electrophoresis. By comparing spot density changes in ischemic and reperfusion samples we detected several protein spots that were differentially abundant. Using MALDI-TOF/TOF-MS and ESI-MS the proteins were identified and subsequently grouped by functionality. Most prominent were changes in apoptosis signalling, cell structure and energy-metabolism. Alterations were confirmed by analysis of human biopsies from patients with ischemic cardiomyopathy
A Systematic Analysis of Eluted Fraction of Plasma Post Immunoaffinity Depletion: Implications in Biomarker Discovery
Plasma is the most easily accessible source for biomarker discovery in clinical proteomics. However, identifying potential biomarkers from plasma is a challenge given the large dynamic range of proteins. The potential biomarkers in plasma are generally present at very low abundance levels and hence identification of these low abundance proteins necessitates the depletion of highly abundant proteins. Sample pre-fractionation using immuno-depletion of high abundance proteins using multi-affinity removal system (MARS) has been a popular method to deplete multiple high abundance proteins. However, depletion of these abundant proteins can result in concomitant removal of low abundant proteins. Although there are some reports suggesting the removal of non-targeted proteins, the predominant view is that number of such proteins is small. In this study, we identified proteins that are removed along with the targeted high abundant proteins. Three plasma samples were depleted using each of the three MARS (Hu-6, Hu-14 and Proteoprep 20) cartridges. The affinity bound fractions were subjected to gelC-MS using an LTQ-Orbitrap instrument. Using four database search algorithms including MassWiz (developed in house), we selected the peptides identified at <1% FDR. Peptides identified by at least two algorithms were selected for protein identification. After this rigorous bioinformatics analysis, we identified 101 proteins with high confidence. Thus, we believe that for biomarker discovery and proper quantitation of proteins, it might be better to study both bound and depleted fractions from any MARS depleted plasma sample
The genera of the African Lycaenidae (Lepidoptera: Rhopalocera)
Volume: Supplement 10Start Page: 1End Page: 32
Entwicklung eines Erhebungsinstruments für verschiedene Formen von State-Langeweile
Angesichts zahlreicher Befunde zu negativen Folgeerscheinungen von Langeweile im
akademischen Kontext, wie etwa Leistungsminderung, Schulabsentismus und geringes
Wohlbefinden (Götz & Baumann, 2015), besteht dringender Bedarf, aktuelle Erkenntnisse zu
verschiedenen Arten von Langeweile (Götz et al., 2014) zu replizieren und weiter zu
untersuchen. Ziel dieser Masterarbeit war es, latente Langeweileprofile entlang der
Dimensionen Aktivation und Valenz zu differenzieren. Dazu wurde in eine Latente
Profilanalyse in Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 2017) durchgeführt. Die Langeweileprofile
wurden auf intra- und interindividuelle Variabilität untersucht und auf potenzielle
Verbindungen mit weiteren Charakterisierungsvariablen analysiert. Es konnten drei
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Langeweileprofile analog zu Götz et al. (2014) repliziert werden (suchend, kalibrierend und
reaktant). Zudem wurden weitere zwei Profile gefunden, die Mischformen darstellen
(schwach negativ-valent apathisch und negativ-valent kalibrierend). Obwohl Personen
verschiedene Formen von Langeweile erleben können, wurde eine Tendenz zur
Personengebundenheit der Profile festgestellt. Zudem unterscheiden sich die gefunden
Profile in weiteren relevanten Charakterisierungsvariablen. Insbesondere reaktante
Langeweile konnte im Vergleich zu allen anderen Langeweileprofilen durch besonders
ausgeprägtes Mind-Wandering charakterisiert werden. Weitere Studien werden benötigt,
um die Ergebnisse zu replizieren und der Bedeutung verschiedener Denkstile als
Charakterisierungsmerkmale für die jeweiligen Langeweileprofile nachzugehen.In view of numerous findings on negative consequences of boredom in the academic
context, such as reduced performance, school absenteeism and low well-being (Götz &
Baumann, 2015), there is an urgent need to replicate and further investigate current findings
on different types of boredom (Götz et al., 2014). The aim of this master thesis was to
differentiate latent boredom profiles along the dimensions of activation and valence. For
this purpose, a latent profile analysis in Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 2017) was carried out.
The boredom profiles were examined for intra- and interindividual variability and analyzed
for potential links with further characterization variables. Three boredom profiles analogous
to Götz et al (2014) could be replicated (searching, calibrating and reactant boredom). In
addition, two more profiles were found that represent mixed forms (weakly apathetic and
negatively calibrating). Although individuals may experience different forms of boredom, a
tendency for the profiles to be person-related was observed. Furthermore, the profiles seem
to differ in other relevant characterization variables. Especially reactant boredom could be
characterized by increased mind-wandering compared to all other boredom profiles. Further
studies are needed to replicate the results and to investigate the importance of different
thinking styles as characterization features for the respective boredom profiles
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