Buiding in Dubai and Abu Dhabi - Field excursion of the faculty of civil engineering of the HTWG Konstanz 2009

Die 1,8-Millionenstadt Dubai und die Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate sind eine der Regionen der Welt mit den größten Bauaktivitäten. Der Exkursionsbericht schildert die Eindrücke bei der Exkursion der Fakultät Bauingenieurwesen der HTWG Konstanz im März 2009. Auf dem Programm standen die Baustellen der künstlichen Palmeninsel "Palm Jebel Ali", des "Iris Bay"-Turms mit seiner außergewöhnlichen Architektur sowie des "Latifa Tower", einem "normalen" Hochhaus von 255 Meter Höhe. Geotechnik im Wüstensand unter der Leitung deutscher Firmen waren ebenso zu sehen wie der Bau des weltweit größten Trinkwasserreservoirs. Weitere Höhepunkte der Reise waren die Baustellen des "Khalifa National Stadium" und der 1455 Meter langen Saadiyat-Brücke in Abu Dhabi, die die zukünftige Kulturmeile Abu Dhabis auf der Saadiyat Insel mit dem Festland verbinden wird.Dubai and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are one of the regions in the world with the greatest building activities. The report depicts the impressions during a student field excursion of the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the University of Applied Sciences Konstanz, Germany, in March 2009

Detecting the impact of sequencing errors on SAGE data.

Abstract Summary: SAGE data are obtained by sequencing short DNA tags. Due to the mistakes in DNA sequencing, SAGE data contain errors. We propose a new approach to identify tags whose abundance is biased by sequencing errors. This approach is based on a concept of neighbourhood: abundant tags can contaminate tags whose sequence is very close. The application of our approach reveals that moderately abundant tags can be generated by sequencing errors uniquely. It also allows for detecting correct rare tags. Availability: Software is available only to non-profit entities and for non-commercial purposes upon request. Contact: [email protected] * To whom all correspondence should be addressed. 2 Present address: GeneProt Inc., Pré-de-la-Fontaine 2, CH-1217 Meyrin, Switzerland

Large-Scale Identification of Virulence Genes from Streptococcus pneumoniae

Streptococcus pneumoniae is the major cause of bacterial pneumonia, and it is also responsible for otitis media and meningitis in children. Apart from the capsule, the virulence factors of this pathogen are not completely understood. Recent technical advances in the field of bacterial pathogenesis (in vivo expression technology and signature-tagged mutagenesis [STM]) have allowed a large-scale identification of virulence genes. We have adapted to S. pneumoniae the STM technique, originally used for the discovery of Salmonella genes involved in pathogenicity. A library of pneumococcal chromosomal fragments (400 to 600 bp) was constructed in a suicide plasmid vector carrying unique DNA sequence tags and a chloramphenicol resistance marker. The recent clinical isolate G54 was transformed with this library. Chloramphenicol-resistant mutants were obtained by homologous recombination, resulting in genes inactivated by insertion of the suicide vector carrying a unique tag. In a mouse pneumonia model, 1.250 candidate clones were screened; 200 of these were not recovered from the lungs were therefore considered virulence-attenuated mutants. The regions flanking the chloramphenicol gene of the attenuated mutants were amplified by inverse PCR and sequenced. The sequence analysis showed that the 200 mutants had insertions in 126 different genes that could be grouped in six classes: (i) known pneumococcal virulence genes; (ii) genes involved in metabolic pathways; (iii) genes encoding proteases; (iv) genes coding for ATP binding cassette transporters; (v) genes encoding proteins involved in DNA recombination/repair; and (vi) DNA sequences that showed similarity to hypothetical genes with unknown function. To evaluate the virulence attenuation for each mutant, all 126 clones were individually analyzed in a mouse septicemia model. Not all mutants selected in the pneumonia model were confirmed in septicemia, thus indicating the existence of virulence factors specific for pneumonia