ALBERT

Description: Insects with complex life-cycles should optimize age and size at maturity during larval development. When inhabiting seasonal environments, organisms have limited reproductive periods and face fundamental decisions: individuals that reach maturity late in season have to either reproduce at a small size or increase their growth rates. Increasing growth rates is costly in insects because of higher juvenile mortality, decreased adult survival or increased susceptibility to parasitism by bacteria and viruses via compromised immune function. Environmental changes such as seasonality can also alter the quantitative genetic architecture. Here, we explore the quantitative genetics of life history and immunity traits under two experimentally induced seasonal environments in the cricket Gryllus bimaculatus. Seasonality affected the life history but not the immune phenotypes. Individuals under decreasing day length developed slower and grew to a bigger size. We found ample additive genetic variance and heritability for components of immunity (haemocyte densities, proPhenoloxidase activity, resistance against Serratia marcescens), and for the life history traits, age and size at maturity. Despite genetic covariance among traits, the structure of G was inconsistent with genetically based trade-off between life history and immune traits (for example, a strong positive genetic correlation between growth rate and haemocyte density was estimated). However, conditional evolvabilities support the idea that genetic covariance structure limits the capacity of individual traits to evolve independently. We found no evidence for G × E interactions arising from the experimentally induced seasonality.

Description: Cell-based therapies, such as adoptive immunotherapy and stem-cell therapy, have received considerable attention as novel therapeutics in oncological research and clinical practice. The development of effective therapeutic strategies using tumor-targeted cells requires the ability to determine in vivo the location, distribution, and long-term viability of the therapeutic cell populations as well as their biological fate with respect to cell activation and differentiation. In conjunction with various noninvasive imaging modalities, cell-labeling methods, such as exogenous labeling or transfection with a reporter gene, allow visualization of labeled cells in vivo in real time, as well as monitoring and quantifying cell accumulation and function. Such cell-tracking methods also have an important role in basic cancer research, where they serve to elucidate novel biological mechanisms. In this Review, we describe the basic principles of cell-tracking methods, explain various approaches to cell tracking, and highlight recent examples for the application of such methods in animals and humans.

Description: El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the Pacific and the analogous Atlantic Niño mode are generated by processes involving coupled ocean–atmosphere interactions known as the Bjerknes feedback. It has been argued that the Atlantic Niño mode is more strongly damped than ENSO, which is presumed to be closer to neutrally stable. In this study the stability of ENSO and the Atlantic Niño mode is compared via an analysis of the Bjerknes stability index. This index is based on recharge oscillator theory and can be interpreted as the growth rate for coupled modes of ocean–atmosphere variability. Using observational data, an ocean reanalysis product, and output from an ocean general circulation model, the individual terms of the Bjerknes index are calculated for the first time for the Atlantic and then compared to results for the Pacific. Positive thermocline feedbacks in response to wind stress forcing favor anomaly growth in both basins, but they are twice as large in the Pacific compared to the Atlantic. Thermocline feedback is related to the fetch of the zonal winds, which is much greater in the equatorial Pacific than in the equatorial Atlantic due to larger basin size. Negative feedbacks are dominated by thermal damping of sea surface temperature anomalies in both basins. Overall, it is found that both ENSO and the Atlantic Niño mode are damped oscillators, but the Atlantic is more strongly damped than the Pacific primarily because of the weaker thermocline feedback.

Description: Phillipp Fisch und seine Familie haben ein Problem. Schon seit einer Weile bekommen sie immer schwerer Luft. Daraufhin macht sich Familie Fisch auf den Weg, um das Rätsel um die ominösen Sauerstoffminimumzonen zu lösen. Dabei treffen sie unter anderem auf kiffende Schlangensterne und weise Kraken...

Description: 3rd November to 17th November 2020, Kiel - Kiel

Description: (GPF 20-3_080) 08.11.2020 –08.12.2020, Emden – Emden, King's Trough