Complex interactions of cellular players in chronic Graft-versus-Host Disease

Chronic Graft-versus-Host Disease is a life-threatening inflammatory condition that affects many patients after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Although we have made substantial progress in understanding disease pathogenesis and the role of specific immune cell subsets, treatment options are still limited. To date, we lack a global understanding of the interplay between the different cellular players involved, in the affected tissues and at different stages of disease development and progression. In this review we summarize our current knowledge on pathogenic and protective mechanisms elicited by the major involved immune subsets, being T cells, B cells, NK cells and antigen presenting cells, as well as the microbiome, with a special focus on intercellular communication of these cell types via extracellular vesicles as up-and-coming fields in chronic Graft-versus-Host Disease research. Lastly, we discuss the importance of understanding systemic and local aberrant cell communication during disease for defining better biomarkers and therapeutic targets, eventually enabling the design of personalized treatment schemes

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der betrieblichen Arbeitszeitfestsetzung - Kostenoptimum durch Flexibilität am Beispiel ausgewählter Angestellten-Kollektivverträge der Baubranche

Zusammenfassung in englischer SpracheDas Thema Arbeitszeitgestaltung bzw. flexible Arbeitszeit gewinnt immer mehr an Bedeutung in der heutigen Zeit. Vor allem im letzten Jahrzehnt hat die österreichische Politik versucht, dieses Themengebiet aufzugreifen, indem neue Gesetze erlassen und alte Gesetze reformiert werden. Das österreichische Arbeitszeitgesetz sieht allerdings auch Gestaltungsfreiheiten für Kollektivverträge und Betriebsvereinbarungen vor. Inwieweit diese Möglichkeiten für eine höhere Flexibilität in ausgewählten Angestellten-Kollektivverträgen der Baubranche umgesetzt und angewendet werden, soll mit dieser Diplomarbeit geklärt werden. Daher werden zunächst die wesentlichsten Begriffe, Grenzen und Möglichkeiten innerhalb des österreichischen Arbeitszeitgesetzes erklärt und beschrieben. Es werden Arbeitszeitmodelle, verschiedene Durchrechnungsmodelle sowie noch nicht konkret gesetzlich definierte Modelle, wie zum Beispiel das Sabbatical, erläutert. Zusätzlich wird dargelegt, welche rechtlichen Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten den Kollektivverträgen sowie der Betriebsvereinbarung im österreichischen Arbeitsrecht eingeräumt werden. Anschließend werden die drei verschiedenen Angestellten-Kollektivverträge umrissen. Einerseits wird der 'Kollektivvertrag für Angestellte der Baugewerbe und der Bauindustrie' sowie der 'Kollektivvertrag für Angestellte des Metallgewerbes', andererseits der 'Angestellten-Kollektivvertrag in der für den Fachverband der Maschinen-, Metallwaren- und Gießereiindustrie (ausgenommen die Berufsgruppe Gießereiindustrie) geltenden Fassung' vorgestellt. Diese drei Kollektivverträge werden auf ihre Möglichkeiten der Arbeitszeitgestaltung untersucht und erläutert. Zuletzt werden in einem Vergleich die Vor- und Nachteile der Arbeitszeitmodelle der jeweiligen Kollektivverträge erörtert. Außerdem werden die Unterschiede zum Arbeitszeitgesetz dargelegt. Mit Hilfe dieser Erkenntnisse werden die kostengünstigsten Möglichkeiten der Arbeitszeitgestaltung dargelegt und somit optimale Entscheidungshilfen für den Unternehmer geschaffen. Zusätzlich wird aufgezeigt, welche Modelle am häufigsten in der Praxis zur Anwendung kommen.At the present time, the issues of organization of work time or flexible work time are becoming increasingly important. Particularly in the last decade, Austrian politics have tried to address the topic in both passing new and reforming existing laws. However, the Austrian Working Hours Act also provides freedom of legal arrangement for collective agreements and company agreements. This master thesis investigates to which extent these possibilities are implemented and applied for a higher flexibility in the employee collective agreements of the construction industries. At first essential terms, limitations and possibilities within the Austrian Working Hours Act are explained and described. Working time models, different models for averaging working hours, as well as models which have not been legally defined yet, such as Sabbatical, are discussed. Furthermore, the possible legal arrangements within the collective agreements and company agreements are described. After that the following three different collective agreements for employees are outlined: the one for employees in the building and construction industry, the one for employees of the metal industry and the one for employees of the Association of the Austrian Machinery, Metalware and Foundry Industry. These three collective agreements are investigated and discussed in terms of their possibilities of organizing work time. Finally, the pros and cons of working time models of the respective collective agreements are summarized. Additionally, the differences to the Austrian Working Hours Act and the thus arisen higher flexibility are shown. Due to these results, cost-effective possibilities of organizing work time are outlined and optimal decision support for entrepreneurs is thereby created. Furthermore, it is discussed which models are most frequently applied in practice.19

Potenzialanalyse der Sektorenkopplung von Energiewirtschaft, Landwirtschaft und freiwilligem Emissionsmarkt in einer Erneuerbare-Energie-Gemeinschaft

In dieser Arbeit werden die Emissionsvermeidungspotenziale verschiedener Maßnahmen für einen Milchviehbetrieb in Vorarlberg analysiert. Es werden verschiedene Möglichkeiten beleuchtet, wie diese Treibhausgaseinsparungen auf dem freiwilligen Emissionsmarkt handelbar gemacht und dadurch finanziert werden können. Hintergrund ist, dass der Milchviehbetrieb eine Biogasanlage besitzt, für welche die Förderperiode ausgelaufen ist. Da die Biogasanlage ohne geförderten Einspeisetarif nicht mehr wirtschaftlich ist, wurde, um den Einspeisetarif anzuheben, das Pilotprojekt einer Erneuerbare-Energie-Gemeinschaft gestartet. Aus diesem Grund wird auch die Möglichkeit der Integration des Treibhausgasemissionshandels in die Erneuerbare-Energie-Gemeinschaft geprüft. Dies soll in Form einer Umlegung der Mehrkosten für die Emissionsminderungsmaßnahmen auf den Strompreis innerhalb der Erneuerbare-Energie-Gemeinschaft geschehen. Ergebnis ist, dass die Höhe des Aufschlags stark vom Umsetzungserfolg (Menge der Emissionseinsparungen), den Umsetzungskosten (Gestehungskosten der Klimaschutzmaßnahmen) und von den Transaktionskosten (Verwaltung) abhängt. Der Aufschlag steht für eine Ökologisierung des erneuerbaren Stroms. In dieser Weise wird regional erzeugter erneuerbarer Strom zum lokal klimawirksamen „Ökostrom“. Die Erneuerbare-Energie-Gemeinschaft ist somit mehr als Stromhandel unter Nachbarn, nämlich eine Synergie zwischen Land- und Energiewirtschaft und steht für eine Sektorenkopplung auf dem Weg zur klimaneutralen Wirtschaft.In this thesis the emission reduction potentials of different measures for a dairy farm in Vorarlberg are analyzed. Various possibilities are discussed as to how these greenhouse gas reductions can be made tradable on the voluntary carbon market and thus financed. The background is that the dairy farm owns a biogas plant for which the funding period has expired. Since the biogas plant is no longer economical without a subsidized feed-in tariff, the pilot project of a renewable energy community was started in order to increase the feed-in tariff. For this reason, the possibility of integrating carbon trading into the renewable energy community is also being examined. This is envisaged in the form of an allocation of the additional costs for the emission reduction measures to the electricity price within the renewable energy community. The result is that the level of the surcharge depends strongly on the implementation success (amount of emission savings), the implementation costs (prime costs of climate protection measures) and on the transaction costs (administration). The surcharge represents a greening of renewable electricity. In this way, regionally generated renewable electricity becomes locally climate-effective "green electricity". The renewable energy community is thus more than electricity trading among neighbors, namely a synergy between agriculture and energy economy it stands for sector coupling on the way to a carbon neutral economy

Unternehmensgruendungen in den fuenf neuen Bundeslaendern

IAB-90-0DD0-117100 AT 755 / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

Facilitating Resilience during an African Swine Fever Outbreak in the Austrian Pork Supply Chain through Hybrid Simulation Modelling

This study aimed to simulate the impact of an African swine fever (ASF) outbreak in Austria. ASF is one of the most significant and critical diseases for the global domestic pig population. Hence, the authors evaluated control strategies and identified bottlenecks during an ASF outbreak. A hybrid approach was selected, including discrete-event and agent-based simulation. An extended Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) model (within a pig farm) and a standard SEIR model (between pig farms) were used to simulate the chain of infection. A total of 576 scenarios with several parameter variations were calculated to identify the influence of external factors on key performance indicators. The main results show a comparison between two control strategies anchored in law: a standard strategy (SS) and a preventive culling strategy (SC). The calculated scenarios show a difference between these strategies and indicate that with SC during an outbreak, fewer farms would be infected, and fewer pigs would be culled. Furthermore, specific geographical areas were identified, which—due to their density of pigs and farms—would be severely affected in case of an ASF outbreak. The analysis of bottlenecks in rendering plants (RPs) showed an increase in the number of days RPs were overutilized as the transmission rate increased. In addition, SS caused more days of overutilized RPs than SC