Minimal Reporting Standards for Active Middle Ear Hearing Implants.

There is currently no standardized method for reporting audiological, surgical and subjective outcome measures in clinical trials with active middle ear implants (AMEIs). It is often difficult to compare studies due to data incompatibility and to perform meta-analyses across different centres is almost impossible. A committee of ENT and audiological experts from Germany, Austria and Switzerland decided to address this issue by developing new minimal standards for reporting the outcomes of AMEI clinical trials. The consensus presented here aims to provide a recommendation to enable better inter-study comparability

The Structural Biology Knowledgebase: a portal to protein structures, sequences, functions, and methods

The Protein Structure Initiative’s Structural Biology Knowledgebase (SBKB, URL: http://sbkb.org) is an open web resource designed to turn the products of the structural genomics and structural biology efforts into knowledge that can be used by the biological community to understand living systems and disease. Here we will present examples on how to use the SBKB to enable biological research. For example, a protein sequence or Protein Data Bank (PDB) structure ID search will provide a list of related protein structures in the PDB, associated biological descriptions (annotations), homology models, structural genomics protein target status, experimental protocols, and the ability to order available DNA clones from the PSI:Biology-Materials Repository. A text search will find publication and technology reports resulting from the PSI’s high-throughput research efforts. Web tools that aid in research, including a system that accepts protein structure requests from the community, will also be described. Created in collaboration with the Nature Publishing Group, the Structural Biology Knowledgebase monthly update also provides a research library, editorials about new research advances, news, and an events calendar to present a broader view of structural genomics and structural biology

The Regulation of Carbon and Nutrient Assimilation in Diatoms is Significantly Different from Green Algae

Diatoms are important primary producers not only in the oceans but also in the freshwater environment. The efficiency of biomass formation strongly depends on the metabolic regulation of carbon and nutrient assimilation. Recent studies have given evidence that many metabolic regulations are quite different from green algae and higher plants. The major known differences concern the following processes: (1) pigment biosynthesis, (2) lightharvesting organisation, (3) mechanism of photoprotection, (4) regulation of photosynthetic electron flow, (5) regulation of the enzyme activity in the Calvin-Benson cycle, (6) photorespiration, (7) carbon aquisition and CO2-concentrating mechanisms, (8) synthesis and breakdown of storage products under starvation, (8) nutrient uptake (9) adaptation to extreme environments. This review summarises these differences phenomenologically and presents the actual knowledge of the underlying mechanisms. The availability of whole genome sequence data is an important basis to learn in more detail how photosynthesis in these tremendously successful primary producers is regulated