Give CRISPR a chance : the GeneSprout Initiative

Did you know that a group of early-career researchers launched an initiative enabling open dialog on new plant breeding techniques, such as genome editing? We developed a wide-ranging initiative that aims to facilitate public engagement and provide a platform for young plant scientists to encourage participation in science communication

Detection and Classification of Local Ca²⁺ Release Events in Cardiomyocytes Using 3D-UNet Neural Network

Global Ca²⁺ increase in the cytosol of cardiomyocytes is crucial for the contraction of the heart. Malfunctioning of proteins involved in this process can trigger local events (e.g., sparks and puffs) and global events (e.g., waves). These are thought to be involved in the development of arrhythmia. Therefore, it is important to detect and classify local Ca²⁺ release events. We present a novel approach, based on a 3D U‐Net architecture, to perform these tasks in a fully automated fashion. We employed data obtained with fast xyt confocal imaging of cardiomyocytes where such subcellular Ca²⁺ events are manually annotated and trained the neural network to infer comparable segmentation as output. Despite the relatively small amount of available data and the challenges that it exhibits, we obtained qualitatively promising results

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Temporal effects of lexical alignment: Evidence from task-oriented discourse

Foltz A, Gaspers J, Meyer C, Thiele K, Cimiano P, Stenneken P. Temporal effects of lexical alignment: Evidence from task-oriented discourse. Presented at the 11th International Symposium of Psycholinguistics, Tenerife, Spain.Alignment in communication, the adaptation to one’s communication partner, is a pervasive phenomenon in everyday life, which occurs at various linguistic levels (Pickering & Garrod, 2004). Numerous studies have shown reliable lexical and syntactic alignment in a dialog context (e.g. Branigan et al., 2000; 2011). Many of these studies have focused on alignment at one linguistic level, in a rather short time frame, and in a controlled experimental setting. This study focuses on how lexical and syntactic alignment evolves over time, that is, over a longer stretch of discourse. Pairs of participants played a game together in which they matched each other’s array of objects in a grid. During each round of the game, one participant (the instructor) described the position of five geometric shapes in different colors to his or her interlocutor (the slider). Instructors could see the slider’s array and thus monitor successful placement of the shapes. Once all shapes were placed correctly, participants switched roles until a total of eight rounds were completed. All pairs of participants moved the same shapes to the same locations in the same order. To test whether participants showed alignment in a setting where neither syntax nor lexical items were experimentally manipulated, we created a baseline by comparing the utterances of instructors and sliders who did not actually play together. The results showed reliable lexical and syntactic alignment compared to the baseline. In addition, we found that lexical alignment, but not syntactic alignment, increased over the course of the game. Furthermore, lexical alignment, but not syntactic alignment, contributed to task success: the higher lexical alignment, the faster participants completed the task. We discuss the results in relation to current models of alignment

Temporal Effects of Alignment in Text-Based, Task-Oriented Discourse

Foltz A, Gaspers J, Meyer C, Thiele K, Cimiano P, Stenneken P. Temporal Effects of Alignment in Text-Based, Task-Oriented Discourse. Discourse Processes. 2015;52(8):609-641.Communicative alignment refers to adaptation to one's communication partner. Temporal aspects of such alignment have been little explored. This paper examines temporal aspects of lexical and syntactic alignment (i.e. tendencies to use the interlocutor's lexical items and syntactic structures) in task-oriented discourse. In particular, we investigate whether lexical and syntactic alignment increases throughout the discourse, and whether alignment contributes to speedy task completion. We present data from a text-based chat game, where participants instructed each other on where to place objects in a grid. Our methodological approach allows calculating a robust baseline and revealed reliable lexical and syntactic alignment. However, only lexical alignment, but not syntactic alignment, was sensitive to temporal aspects in that only lexical alignment increased throughout the discourse and positively affected task completion time. We discuss how these results relate to the communicative task and mention implications for models of alignment

The Role of Emotional Congruence in Human-Robot Interaction

Malchus K, Jaecks P, Damm O, Stenneken P, Meyer C, Wrede B. The Role of Emotional Congruence in Human-Robot Interaction. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. Piscataway, NJ, USA: IEEE Press; 2013: 191-192

Relation of heart rate and its variability during sleep with age, physical activity, and body composition in young children

Background: Recent studies have claimed a positive effect of physical activity and body composition on vagal tone. In pediatric populations, there is a pronounced decrease in heart rate with age. While this decrease is often interpreted as an age-related increase in vagal tone, there is some evidence that it may be related to a decrease in intrinsic heart rate. This factor has not been taken into account in most previous studies. The aim of the present study was to assess the association between physical activity and/or body composition and heart rate variability (HRV) independently of the decline in heart rate in young children. Methods: Anthropometric measurements were taken in 309 children aged 2-6 years. Ambulatory electrocardiograms were collected over 14-18 h comprising a full night and accelerometry over 7 days. HRV was determined of three different night segments: (1) over 5 min during deep sleep identified automatically based on HRV characteristics; (2) during a 20 min segment starting 15 min after sleep onset; (3) over a 4-h segment between midnight and 4 a.m. Linear models were computed for HRV parameters with anthropometric and physical activity variables adjusted for heart rate and other confounding variables (e.g., age for physical activity models). Results: We found a decline in heart rate with increasing physical activity and decreasing skinfold thickness. HRV parameters decreased with increasing age, height, and weight in HR-adjusted regression models. These relationships were only found in segments of deep sleep detected automatically based on HRV or manually 15 min after sleep onset, but not in the 4-h segment with random sleep phases. Conclusions: Contrary to most previous studies, we found no increase of standard HRV parameters with age, however, when adjusted for heart rate, there was a significant decrease of HRV parameters with increasing age. Without knowing intrinsic heart rate correct interpretation of HRV in growing children is impossible

Systemic immune challenges trigger and drive Alzheimer-like neuropathology in mice

BACKGROUND: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most prevalent form of age-related dementia, and its effect on society increases exponentially as the population ages. Accumulating evidence suggests that neuroinflammation, mediated by the brain's innate immune system, contributes to AD neuropathology and exacerbates the course of the disease. However, there is no experimental evidence for a causal link between systemic inflammation or neuroinflammation and the onset of the disease. METHODS: The viral mimic, polyriboinosinic-polyribocytidilic acid (PolyI:C) was used to stimulate the immune system of experimental animals. Wild-type (WT) and transgenic mice were exposed to this cytokine inducer prenatally (gestation day (GD)17) and/or in adulthood. Behavioral, immunological, immunohistochemical, and biochemical analyses of AD-associated neuropathologic changes were performed during aging. RESULTS: We found that a systemic immune challenge during late gestation predisposes WT mice to develop AD-like neuropathology during the course of aging. They display chronic elevation of inflammatory cytokines, an increase in the levels of hippocampal amyloid precursor protein (APP) and its proteolytic fragments, altered Tau phosphorylation, and mis-sorting to somatodendritic compartments, and significant impairments in working memory in old age. If this prenatal infection is followed by a second immune challenge in adulthood, the phenotype is strongly exacerbated, and mimics AD-like neuropathologic changes. These include deposition of APP and its proteolytic fragments, along with Tau aggregation, microglia activation and reactive gliosis. Whereas Aβ peptides were not significantly enriched in extracellular deposits of double immune-challenged WT mice at 15 months, they dramatically increased in age-matched immune-challenged transgenic AD mice, precisely around the inflammation-induced accumulations of APP and its proteolytic fragments, in striking similarity to the post-mortem findings in human patients with AD. CONCLUSION: Chronic inflammatory conditions induce age-associated development of an AD-like phenotype in WT mice, including the induction of APP accumulations, which represent a seed for deposition of aggregation-prone peptides. The PolyI:C mouse model therefore provides a unique tool to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying the earliest pathophysiological changes preceding fibrillary Aβ plaque deposition and neurofibrillary tangle formations in a physiological context of aging. Based on the similarity between the changes in immune-challenged mice and the development of AD in humans, we suggest that systemic infections represent a major risk factor for the development of AD

Complete genome sequence and analysis of the multiresistant nosocomial pathogen Corynebacterium jeikeium K411, a lipid-requiring bacterium of the human skin flora

Tauch A, Kaiser O, Hain T, et al. Complete genome sequence and analysis of the multiresistant nosocomial pathogen Corynebacterium jeikeium K411, a lipid-requiring bacterium of the human skin flora. Journal of Bacteriology. 2005;187(13):4671-4682.Corynebacterium jeikeium is a "lipophilic" and multidrug-resistant bacterial species of the human skin flora that has been recognized with increasing frequency as a serious nosocomial pathogen. Here we report the genome sequence of the clinical isolate C. jeikeium K411, which was initially recovered from the axilla of a bone marrow transplant patient. The genome of C. jeikeium K411 consists of a circular chromosome of 2,462,499 bp and the 14,323-bp bacteriocin-producing plasmid pKW4. The chromosome of C. jeikeium K411 contains 2,104 predicted coding sequences, 52% of which were considered to be orthologous with genes in the Corynebacterium glutamicum, Corynebacterium efficiens, and Corynebacterium diphtheriae genomes. These genes apparently represent the chromosomal backbone that is conserved between the four corynebacteria. Among the genes that lack an ortholog in the known corynebacterial genomes, many are located close to transposable elements or revealed an atypical G+C content, indicating that horizontal gene transfer played an important role in the acquisition of genes involved in iron and manganese homeostasis, in multidrug resistance, in bacterium-host interaction, and in virulence. Metabolic analyses of the genome sequence indicated that the "lipophilic" phenotype of C jeikeium most likely originates from the absence of fatty acid synthase and thus represents a fatty acid auxotrophy. Accordingly, both the complete gene repertoire and the deduced lifestyle of C. jeikeium K411 largely reflect the strict dependence of growth on the presence of exogenous fatty acids. The predicted virulence factors of C. jeikeium K411 are apparently involved in ensuring the availability of exogenous fatty acids by damaging the host tissue