University of Geneva

About: University of Geneva is a education organization based out in Geneva, Switzerland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Planet. The organization has 26887 authors who have published 65265 publications receiving 2931373 citations. The organization is also known as: Geneva University & Universite de Geneve.

Endurance Training in Humans Leads to Fiber Type-Specific Increases in Levels of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor-γ Coactivator-1 and Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor-α in Skeletal Muscle

Abstract: The peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR)-γ coactivator-1 (PGC-1) can induce mitochondria biogenesis and has been implicated in the development of oxidative type I muscle fibers. The PPAR isoforms α, β/δ, and γ control the transcription of genes involved in fatty acid and glucose metabolism. As endurance training increases skeletal muscle mitochondria and type I fiber content and fatty acid oxidative capacity, our aim was to determine whether these increases could be mediated by possible effects on PGC-1 or PPAR-α, -β/δ, and -γ. Seven healthy men performed 6 weeks of endurance training and the expression levels of PGC-1 and PPAR-α, -β/δ, and -γ mRNA as well as the fiber type distribution of the PGC-1 and PPAR-α proteins were measured in biopsies from their vastus lateralis muscle. PGC-1 and PPAR-α mRNA expression increased by 2.7- and 2.2-fold (P

The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets XI. Super-Earths (5 & 8 M_Earth) in a 3-planet system

Abstract: This Letter reports on the detection of two super-Earth planets in the Gl581 system, already known to harbour a hot Neptune. One of the planets has a mass of 5 M_Earth and resides at the ``warm'' edge of the habitable zone of the star. It is thus the known exoplanet which most resembles our own Earth. The other planet has a 7.7 M_Earth mass and orbits at 0.25 AU from the star, close to the ``cold'' edge of the habitable zone. These two new light planets around an M3 dwarf further confirm the formerly tentative statistical trend for i) many more very low-mass planets being found around M dwarfs than around solar-type stars and ii) low-mass planets outnumbering Jovian planets around M dwarfs.

The Cosmic Microwave Background

Abstract: The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the radiation left over from the Big Bang Recent analysis of the fluctuations in this radiation has given us valuable insights into our Universe and its parameters Examining the theory of CMB and recent developments, this textbook starts with a brief introduction to modern cosmology and its main successes, followed by a thorough derivation of cosmological perturbation theory It then explores the generation of initial fluctuations by inflation The Boltzmann equation governs the evolution of CMB anisotropies and polarization is derived using the total angular momentum method Cosmological parameter estimation and the lensing of CMB fluctuations and spectral distortions are also discussed This textbook is the first to contain a full derivation of the theory of CMB anisotropies and polarization Ideal for graduate students and researchers in this field, it includes end-of-chapter exercises, and solutions to selected exercises are provided

Automatic tracking of individual fluorescence particles: application to the study of chromosome dynamics

Abstract: We present a new, robust, computational procedure for tracking fluorescent markers in time-lapse microscopy. The algorithm is optimized for finding the time-trajectory of single particles in very noisy dynamic (two- or three-dimensional) image sequences. It proceeds in three steps. First, the images are aligned to compensate for the movement of the biological structure under investigation. Second, the particle's signature is enhanced by applying a Mexican hat filter, which we show to be the optimal detector of a Gaussian-like spot in 1//spl omega//sup 2/ noise. Finally, the optimal trajectory of the particle is extracted by applying a dynamic programming optimization procedure. We have used this software, which is implemented as a Java plug-in for the public-domain ImageJ software, to track the movement of chromosomal loci within nuclei of budding yeast cells. Besides reducing trajectory analysis time by several 100-fold, we achieve high reproducibility and accuracy of tracking. The application of the method to yeast chromatin dynamics reveals different classes of constraints on mobility of telomeres, reflecting differences in nuclear envelope association. The generic nature of the software allows application to a variety of similar biological imaging tasks that require the extraction and quantitation of a moving particle's trajectory.