The role of competition in tree communities is increasingly well understood, while little is known about the patterns and mechanisms of the interplay between above- and belowground competition in tree communities. This knowledge, however, is crucial for a better understanding of community dynamics and developing adaptive near-natural management strategies. We assessed neighbourhood interactions in an unmanaged old-growth European beech (Fagus sylvatica) forest by quantifying variation in the intensity of above- (shading) and belowground competition (crowding) among dominant and co-dominant canopy beech trees during tree maturation. Shading had on average a much larger impact on radial growth than crowding and the sensitivity to changes in competitive conditions was lowest for crowding effects. We found that each mode of competition reduced the effect of the other. Increasing crowding reduced the negative effect of shading, and at high levels of shading, crowding actually had a facilitative effect and increased growth. Our study demonstrates that complementarity in above- and belowground processes enable F. sylvatica to alter resource acquisition strategies, thus optimising tree radial growth. As a result, competition seemed to become less important in stands with a high growing stock and tree communities with a long continuity of anthropogenic undisturbed population dynamics. We suggest that growth rates do not exclusively depend on the density of potential competitors at the intraspecific level, but on the conspecific aggregation of large-diameter trees and their functional role for regulating biotic filtering processes. This finding highlights the potential importance of the rarely examined relationship between the spatial aggregation pattern of large-diameter trees and the outcome of neighbourhood interactions, which may be central to community dynamics and the related forest ecosystem services.

The following essay discusses Herman Melville’s “I and My Chimney” (1856) as a text that engages architecture and writing as interrelated systems of signification. Fueled by a variety of historical developments, domestic architecture emerges as a powerful purveyor of meaning in the antebellum decades. Architecture, in this cultural context, is construed in analogy to writing (and, to some extent, vice versa), as creating houses-as-texts that tell stories about their inhabitants in terms of their individual, familial, and national identities. Thus conceived, domestic architecture is characteristically enlisted in the articulation and stabilization of hegemonic narratives of, e. g., gender and nationhood. Melville’s text invokes this cultural convention to cast the signifying function that architecture and writing perform as being vulnerable and in crisis. This crisis is narrated by an idiosyncratic narrator for whom the semiotic instability documented by his narrative resonates with the social and cultural vulnerability that he experiences—his authority as master of his house and family is challenged in the course of the tale, along with the structural integrity of his chimney with which he wants to symbolically reinforce his authority. I argue that this crisis of signification performs double work in the text. On the one hand, it serves to articulate the anxiety of mid-nineteenth-century cultural elites about what they perceive as a cultural decline. On the other hand, allegedly dysfunctional signification unfolds a critical potential, bringing to light things which ‘functional’ signification had worked to conceal and thereby unlocking hermetic narratives of self, family, and nation.

Aus dem Begleitwort: "schön, dass Sie diese Broschüre zur Hand genommen haben. Die Mitarbeiter unseres Alumni-Teams haben in fleißiger Arbeit eine Menge Informationen zusammengetragen, von denen wir annehmen, dass sie Ihnen nützen werden. Doch zunächst möchte ich Ihnen zu Ihrem Studienerfolg sehr herzlich sowohl im Namen des Rektorats der TU Dresden als auch ganz persönlich gratulieren. Hinter Ihnen liegen viele Stunden voller Ausdauer, Fleiß und Selbstdisziplin. Diese Stunden haben sich nun ausgezahlt, denn mit einem Abschluss der TU Dresden haben Sie sich eine Position erarbeitet, die Ihnen ein hervorragendes Rüstzeug für einen Start in den Beruf oder für die Fortsetzung Ihrer akademischen Laufbahn bietet.":Absolventen und Netzwerk Aus den Augen – aus dem Sinn? 4 Internationale Alumnikontakte leicht gemacht 5 Das Alumni-Jahr 2013/2014 6 Was machen TU-Absolventen heute? 8 Die Fakultäten und ihre Absolventenbeauftragten 10 Campusbüro Uni mit Kind sucht Freunde aus seinen „Kindertagen“ 14 Absolventenvereine 15 nexus – in Verbindung bleiben 16 Spätverkehr – der listige Absolventenverein! 17 Absolventenfeiern 18 Universitätsarchiv und Alumni 20 „Mit dem Motorrad durch den Zeuner-Bau“ 21 Universität und Campus Zeitgeist und Zukunft zugleich 22 Wussten Sie schon, dass 24 Kurz-Geschichte 26 TU-Highlights 2013/2014 27 Zwei Jahre Exzellenz-Universität TU Dresden 29 Die Leitung der Universität 30 Die Besten 32 Auszeichnungen und Ehrungen 2013/2014 34 Praxis und Weiterbildung Überzeugende Gründe für ein Auslandspraktikum 36 Berufseinstieg? Mit Mentoring dort ankommen! 37 Mit dresden exists von der Idee zum eigenen Unternehmen 38 Der Career Service als Türöffner zur Berufswelt 39 Vom Bachelor zum Master 40 DIU/TUDIAS 41 Zentrum für Weiterbildung 42 Stifter und Stipendien Die Freunde und Förderer der TU Dresden 43 Deutschlandstipendium – gemeinsam Zukunft fördern 44 Nach dem Studium: Wissen stiften! 45 Fördervereine (Auswahl) 46 Termine und Veranstaltungen TUD-Termine 48 Kontaktmessen 49 TU-Präsente vorgestellt 50 Campusplan 51

Die Fakultät Wirtschaftswissenschaften der Technischen Universität reicht mit ihren Vorläufereinrichtungen bis in die Gründungsphase der Technischen Bildungsanstalt und späteren Technischen Universität Dresden im Jahr 1828. In ihrer Geschichte spiegelt sich wie kaum bei einer anderen Fakultät dieser Universität die deutsche Geschichte der vergangenen knapp 200 Jahre mit allen ihren Höhen und Tiefen, Brüchen und Neuanläufen wider. (... aus dem Vorwort)

Die Technische Universität Dresden präsentiert sich als Voll-Universität mit einem sehr breiten und vielfältigen wissenschaftlichen Spektrum, wie es nur an wenigen Universitäten Deutschlands angeboten werden kann. Über 36.000 Studierende an 14 Fakultäten erwerben hier ihre Universitätsabschlüsse. Die lange Tradition begann 1828 in den Anfängen der industriellen Revolution mit der Gründung der Technischen Bildungsanstalt. 50 Jahre später fanden erstmals wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Lehrstühle für Nationalökonomie und Statistik Platz innerhalb einer allgemeinen Abteilung des Königlich-Sächsischen Polytechnikums, so der damalige Name. Mit der Neugründung der wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Fakultät 1993 begann eine Erfolgsgeschichte in deren Verlauf sich unsere Fakultät mit aktuell knapp 3000 Studierenden, 26 Lehrstühlen und Professuren und einem breit gestreuten Lehrangebot zur größten wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der neuen Bundesländer entwickelte. (... aus dem Text)

The development of bio-resorbable implant materials is rapidly going on. Sterilization of those materials is inevitable to assure the hygienic requirements for critical medical devices according to the medical device directive (MDD, 93/42/EG). Biopolymer-containing biomaterials are often highly sensitive towards classical sterilization procedures like steam, ethylene oxide treatment or gamma irradiation. Supercritical CO2 (scCO2) treatment is a promising strategy for the terminal sterilization of sensitive biomaterials at low temperature. In combination with low amounts of additives scCO2 treatment effectively inactivates microorganisms including bacterial spores. We established a scCO2 sterilization procedure under addition of 0.25% water, 0.15% hydrogen peroxide and 0.5% acetic anhydride. The procedure was successfully tested for the inactivation of a wide panel of microorganisms including endospores of different bacterial species, vegetative cells of gram positive and negative bacteria including mycobacteria, fungi including yeast, and bacteriophages. For robust testing of the sterilization effect with regard to later application of implant materials sterilization all microorganisms were embedded in alginate/agarose cylinders that were used as Process Challenge Devices (PCD). These PCD served as surrogate models for bioresorbable 3D scaffolds. Furthermore, the impact of scCO2 sterilization on mechanical properties of polysaccharide-based hydrogels and collagen-based scaffolds was analyzed. The procedure was shown to be less compromising on mechanical and rheological properties compared to established low-temperature sterilization methods like gamma irradiation and ethylene oxide exposure as well as conventional steam sterilization. Cytocompatibility of alginate gels and scaffolds from mineralized collagen was compared after sterilization with ethylene oxide, gamma irradiation, steam sterilization and scCO2 treatment. Human mesenchymal stem cell viability and proliferation were not compromised by scCO2 treatment of these materials and scaffolds. We conclude that scCO2 sterilization under addition of water, hydrogen peroxide and acetic anhydride is a very effective, gentle, non-cytotoxic and thus a promising alternative sterilization method especially for biomaterials.

Recently, the fundamental and nanoscale understanding of complex phenomena in materials research and the life sciences, witnessed considerable progress. However, elucidating the underlying mechanisms, governed by entangled degrees of freedom such as lattice, spin, orbit, and charge for solids or conformation, electric potentials, and ligands for proteins, has remained challenging. Techniques that allow for distinguishing between different contributions to these processes are hence urgently required. In this paper we demonstrate the application of scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) as a novel type of nano-probe for tracking transient states of matter. We introduce a sideband-demodulation technique that allows for probing exclusively the stimuli-induced change of near-field optical properties. We exemplify this development by inspecting the decay of an electron-hole plasma generated in SiGe thin films through near-infrared laser pulses. Our approach can universally be applied to optically track ultrafast/-slow processes over the whole spectral range from UV to THz frequencies.

BACKGROUND: Ontologies play a major role in life sciences, enabling a number of applications, from new data integration to knowledge verification. SNOMED CT is a large medical ontology that is formally defined so that it ensures global consistency and support of complex reasoning tasks. Most biomedical ontologies and taxonomies on the other hand define concepts only textually, without the use of logic. Here, we investigate how to automatically generate formal concept definitions from textual ones. We develop a method that uses machine learning in combination with several types of lexical and semantic features and outputs formal definitions that follow the structure of SNOMED CT concept definitions. RESULTS: We evaluate our method on three benchmarks and test both the underlying relation extraction component as well as the overall quality of output concept definitions. In addition, we provide an analysis on the following aspects: (1) How do definitions mined from the Web and literature differ from the ones mined from manually created definitions, e.g., MeSH? (2) How do different feature representations, e.g., the restrictions of relations' domain and range, impact on the generated definition quality?, (3) How do different machine learning algorithms compare to each other for the task of formal definition generation?, and, (4) What is the influence of the learning data size to the task? We discuss all of these settings in detail and show that the suggested approach can achieve success rates of over 90%. In addition, the results show that the choice of corpora, lexical features, learning algorithm and data size do not impact the performance as strongly as semantic types do. Semantic types limit the domain and range of a predicted relation, and as long as relations' domain and range pairs do not overlap, this information is most valuable in formalizing textual definitions. CONCLUSIONS: The analysis presented in this manuscript implies that automated methods can provide a valuable contribution to the formalization of biomedical knowledge, thus paving the way for future applications that go beyond retrieval and into complex reasoning. The method is implemented and accessible to the public from: https://github.com/alifahsyamsiyah/learningDL.

Polypyrimidine-tract binding protein 1 (PTBP1) is an important cellular regulator of messenger RNAs influencing the alternative splicing profile of a cell as well as its mRNA stability, location and translation. In addition, it is diverted by some viruses to facilitate their replication. Here, we used a novel PTBP1 knockout mouse to analyse the tissue expression pattern of PTBP1 as well as the effect of its complete removal during development. We found evidence of strong PTBP1 expression in embryonic stem cells and throughout embryonic development, especially in the developing brain and spinal cord, the olfactory and auditory systems, the heart, the liver, the kidney, the brown fat and cartilage primordia. This widespread distribution points towards a role of PTBP1 during embryonic development. Homozygous offspring, identified by PCR and immunofluorescence, were able to implant but were arrested or retarded in growth. At day 7.5 of embryonic development (E7.5) the null mutants were about 5x smaller than the control littermates and the gap in body size widened with time. At mid-gestation, all homozygous embryos were resorbed/degraded. No homozygous mice were genotyped at E12 and the age of weaning. Embryos lacking PTBP1 did not display differentiation into the 3 germ layers and cavitation of the epiblast, which are hallmarks of gastrulation. In addition, homozygous mutants displayed malformed ectoplacental cones and yolk sacs, both early supportive structure of the embryo proper. We conclude that PTBP1 is not required for the earliest isovolumetric divisions and differentiation steps of the zygote up to the formation of the blastocyst. However, further post-implantation development requires PTBP1 and stalls in homozygous null animals with a phenotype of dramatically reduced size and aberration in embryonic and extra-embryonic structures.

In mammals, myocardial cell death due to infarction results in scar formation and little regenerative response. In contrast, zebrafish have a high capacity to regenerate the heart after surgical resection of myocardial tissue. However, whether zebrafish can also regenerate lesions caused by cell death has not been tested. Here, we present a simple method for induction of necrotic lesions in the adult zebrafish heart based on cryoinjury. Despite widespread tissue death and loss of cardiomyocytes caused by these lesions, zebrafish display a robust regenerative response, which results in substantial clearing of the necrotic tissue and little scar formation. The cellular mechanisms underlying regeneration appear to be similar to those activated in response to ventricular resection. In particular, the epicardium activates a developmental gene program, proliferates and covers the lesion. Concomitantly, mature uninjured cardiomyocytes become proliferative and invade the lesion. Our injury model will be a useful tool to study the molecular mechanisms of natural heart regeneration in response to necrotic cell death.