Zoonotische Infektionen mit Mycobacterium tuberculosis in deutschen Nutztierbeständen

Die Rinder­tuberkulose wird in Europa durch Myco­bacterium (M.) bovis und M. caprae verursacht. Diese Erreger können auch auf Menschen übertragen werden, dem Robert Koch-Institut werden jedes Jahr mehrere Dutzend solcher Erkrankungen übermittelt. Umgekehrt können Menschen die humane Tuberkulose (M. tuberculosis) auf Rinder übertragen. Im Epidemio­logischen Bulletin 20/2017 sind zwei Fall­berichte einer solchen Über­tragung vom Menschen aufs Tier erschienen. Die beiden Autoren kommen aus dem Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut und dem Hessischen Landes­labor, sie erläutern auch bestehende und geplante Maßnahmen für einen inter­dis­zi­pli­nären Schutz vor Zoonosen im Sinne eines One-Health-Kon­zep­tes

Vegetation development on extensive vegetated green roofs

Technology for establishment of vegetated roofs (green roofs) has developed rapidly over recent years but knowledge about how these systems will develop over time is still limited. This study investigates vegetation development on unfertilised thin extensive vegetated roofs during a 3-year period. The vegetation systems investigated were designed to be low maintenance and had a saturated weight of 50 kg/m2, a thickness of 4 cm and drought-resistant succulent and bryophyte vegetation. Vegetation development was investigated in relation to: establishment method, species mixture and substrate composition in a factorial experiment. Vegetation cover was investigated using point intercept. Moss was found to develop on most substrates and reached more than 80% cover on some plots. Sedum album and Sedum acre were the dominant species on the roofs. S. acre was found to decrease drastically after 2 years. The lack of difference found in this study between the establishment techniques shows that there are other possible marketable ways to construct vegetated roofs in Sweden, as an alternative to vegetation mats. Uniform extensive vegetated roofs with a high dominance of succulent species have limited value for plant biodiversity, as few species establish spontaneously

Latent State Inference in a Spatiotemporal Generative Model

Knowledge of the hidden factors that determine particular system dynamics is crucial for both explaining them and pursuing goal-directed, interventional actions. The inference of these factors without supervision given time series data remains an open challenge. Here, we focus on spatio-temporal processes, including wave propagations and weather dynamics, and assume that universal causes (e.g. physics) apply throughout space and time. We apply a novel DIstributed, Spatio-Temporal graph Artificial Neural network Architecture, DISTANA, which learns a generative model in such domains. DISTANA requires fewer parameters, and yields more accurate predictions than temporal convolutional neural networks and other related approaches on a 2D circular wave prediction task. We show that DISTANA, when combined with a retrospective latent state inference principle called active tuning, can reliably derive hidden local causal factors. In a current weather prediction benchmark, DISTANA infers our planet's land-sea mask solely by observing temperature dynamics and uses the self inferred information to improve its own prediction of temperature. We are convinced that the retrospective inference of latent states in generative RNN architectures will play an essential role in future research on causal inference and explainable systems.Comment: As submitted to the 35th conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21

Avocado transcriptomic resources

Avocado (Persea americana Mill) is a high-value, nutrient-dense, subtropical fruit-tree crop experiencing increasing demand globally. At present, the industry is limited by factors including variation in flowering, fruit load and susceptibility to abiotic and biotic stresses. Many of these limitations could be improved with targeted breeding strategies, facilitated through the rapid advancement in genome and transcriptome sequencing and assembly technologies. This chapter outlines the research to date on avocado transcriptomics, with a focus on genetic factors controlling traits of agronomic importance, with potential to inform future breeding and improvement strategies

A genome-wide association study in autoimmune neurological syndromes with anti-GAD65 autoantibodies

Strippel C, Herrera-Rivero M, Wendorff M, et al. A genome-wide association study in autoimmune neurological syndromes with anti-GAD65 autoantibodies. Brain: A Journal of Neurology . 2022: awac119.Autoimmune neurological syndromes (AINS) with autoantibodies against the 65  kDa isoform of the glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD65) present with limbic encephalitis including temporal lobe seizures or epilepsy, cerebellitis with ataxia, and stiff-person-syndrome, or overlap forms. Anti-GAD65 autoantibodies are also detected in autoimmune diabetes mellitus, which has a strong genetic susceptibility conferred by human leukocyte antigen (HLA) and non-HLA genomic regions. We investigated the genetic predisposition in patients with anti-GAD65 AINS. We performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) and an association analysis of the HLA region in a large German cohort of 1,214 individuals. These included 167 patients with anti-GAD65 AINS, recruited by the German Network for Research on Autoimmune Encephalitis (GENERATE), and 1,047 individuals without neurological or endocrine disease as population-based controls. Predictions of protein expression changes based on GWAS findings were further explored and validated in the CSF proteome of a virtually independent cohort of 10 patients with GAD65-AINS and 10 controls. Our GWAS identified 16 genome-wide significant (p90%) mapped to non-coding regions of the genome. Over 40% of the variants have known regulatory functions on the expression of 48 genes in disease relevant cells and tissues, mainly CD4+ T cells and the cerebral cortex. The annotation of epigenomic marks suggested specificity for neural and immune cells. A network analysis of the implicated protein-coding genes highlighted the role of protein kinase C beta (PRKCB) and identified an enrichment of numerous biological pathways participating in immunity and neural function. Analysis of the classical HLA alleles and haplotypes showed no genome-wide significant associations. The strongest associations were found for the DQA1*03:01-DQB1*03:02-DRB1*04:01HLA haplotype (p=4.39*10-4, OR=2.5, 95%CI= 1.499-4.157), and DRB1*04:01 allele (p=8.3*10-5, OR=2.4, 95%CI=1.548-3.682) identified in our cohort. As predicted, the CSF proteome showed differential levels of five proteins (HLA-A/B, C4A, ATG4D and NEO1) of eQTL genes from our GWAS in the CSF proteome of anti-GAD65 AINS. These findings suggest a strong genetic predisposition with direct functional implications for immunity and neural function in anti-GAD65 AINS, mainly conferred by genomic regions outside the classical HLA alleles. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain