University of Vienna

Abstract: ERA-Interim is the latest global atmospheric reanalysis produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). The ERA-Interim project was conducted in part to prepare for a new atmospheric reanalysis to replace ERA-40, which will extend back to the early part of the twentieth century. This article describes the forecast model, data assimilation method, and input datasets used to produce ERA-Interim, and discusses the performance of the system. Special emphasis is placed on various difficulties encountered in the production of ERA-40, including the representation of the hydrological cycle, the quality of the stratospheric circulation, and the consistency in time of the reanalysed fields. We provide evidence for substantial improvements in each of these aspects. We also identify areas where further work is needed and describe opportunities and objectives for future reanalysis projects at ECMWF. Copyright © 2011 Royal Meteorological Society

Abstract: Several reactive oxygen species (ROS) are continuously produced in plants as byproducts of aerobic metabolism. Depending on the nature of the ROS species, some are highly toxic and rapidly detoxified by various cellular enzymatic and nonenzymatic mechanisms. Whereas plants are surfeited with mechanisms to combat increased ROS levels during abiotic stress conditions, in other circumstances plants appear to purposefully generate ROS as signaling molecules to control various processes including pathogen defense, programmed cell death, and stomatal behavior. This review describes the mechanisms of ROS generation and removal in plants during development and under biotic and abiotic stress conditions. New insights into the complexity and roles that ROS play in plants have come from genetic analyses of ROS detoxifying and signaling mutants. Considering recent ROS-induced genome-wide expression analyses, the possible functions and mechanisms for ROS sensing and signaling in plants are compared with those in animals and yeast.

Abstract: Das Elaboration Likelihood Modell (ELM) wurde in den 1980er Jahren von den Sozialpsychologen Richard E. Petty und John T. Cacioppo mit dem Ziel entwickelt, die prozesshafte Verarbeitung persuasiver Botschaften zu erklaren und Einstellungsveranderungen in Abhangigkeit von der Rezeptionssituation, den Eigenschaften einer persuasiven Botschaft und individuellen Voraussetzungen des Rezipienten vorherzusagen. Die zentrale Veroffentlichung dieser Persuasionstheorie ist das 1986 erschienene Buch Communication and persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change. In diesem Schlusselwerk der Medienwirkungsforschung werden das ELM und seine Basiskonzepte theoretisch definiert und durch eine Vielzahl empirischer Studien untermauert. Daruber hinaus diskutieren die Autoren methodische Schwierigkeiten bei der Uberprufung ihrer Annahmen sowie Konsequenzen der verschiedenen Elaborationsrouten. Communication and persuasion bietet damit einen detaillierten Uberblick zu einem der wichtigsten Zwei-Prozess-Modelle der persuasiven Kommunikationsforschung.

Abstract: Roland Mall, Werner W. Franke and Dorothea L. Schiller Division of Membrane Biology and Biochemistry institute of Cell and Tumor Biology German Cancer Research Center D-6900 Heidelberg, Federal Republic of Germany Benjamin Geiger Department of Chemical Immunology The Weizmann Institute of Science Rehovot, Israel Reinhard Krepler Department of Pathology University of Vienna School of Medicine A-l 090 Vienna, Austria Introduction A large proportion of the cytoplasm of vertebrate cells, normal or transformed, is represented by components of the cytoskeleton, including actin-containing micro- filaments, tubulin-containing microtubules and fila- ments of intermediate size, with diameters of 7-l 1 nm. Although such structures have a widespread oc- currence in diverse cell types, examples have been reported in which they are formed in different cell types from different proteins of a multigene family of proteins, or from different subunit polypeptides of a class of related proteins. For example, differentiation specificity of expression of different actins has been described in different cell types of mammals (Vande- kerckhove and Weber, 1979). By far the most striking differentiation specificity of composition has been ob- served for the intermediate-sized filaments. Although all filaments of this category are morphologically iden- tical in different cell types, are insoluble in solutions of a broad range of low or high salt concentrations and non-ionic detergents and seem to share some common assembly properties (Steinert et al., 1981 b) and antigenic determinants (Pruss et al., 1981) im- munological and biochemical criteria allow us to dis- tinguish at least five different types of intermediate filaments (Bennett et al., 1978; Franke et al., 1978a, 1981f; Hynes and Destree, 1978; Lazarides, 1980; Anderton, 1981 ; Holtzer et al., 1981; Osborn et al., 1981). First, filaments containing keratin-like proteins (“cytokeratins”) are characteristic of epithelial cells. Second, vimentin filaments occur in mesenchymally derived cells, in astrocytes, in Sertoli cells, in vascular smooth muscle cells and in many cultured cell lines. Third, desmin filaments are typical of most types of myogenic cells. Fourth, neurofilaments are typical of neuronal cells. Fifth, glial filaments are typical of as- trocytes. During cell transformation and tumor devel- opment this cell type specificity of intermediate fila- ments is largely conserved’ (Franke et al., 1978a, 1978b, 1979a; Hynes and Destree, 1978; Sun and Green, 1978a; Sun et al., 1979; Bannasch et al., 1980; Battifora et al., 1980; Schlegel et al., 1980a; Altmannsberger et al., 1981; Gabbiani et al., 1981; Denk et al., 1982) and classification of tumors by their specific type of intermediate filaments has re- cently become very valuable in clinical histodiagnosis (see, for example, Schlegel et al., 1980a; Gabbiani et al., 1981; Ramaekers et al., 1981). The intermediate filaments of the vimentin, desmin or glial types all consist usually of only one type of subunit protein (desmin and vimentin can occur in the same filament in BHK cells and vascular smooth mus- cle cells; Steinert et al., 1981 a; Quinlan and Franke, 1982). In contrast with these, the cytokeratin fila- ments, which are composed of proteins related to, but not identical with, epidermal (Y keratins, are a complex family of many different polypeptides. These cytoker- atins, which show biochemical and immunological re- lationships of various degrees, are expressed, in dif- ferent epithelia, in different combinations polypep- tides ranging in their isoelectric pH values from 5 to 8 and in their apparent molecular weights from 40,000 to 68,000 (Doran et al., 1980; Winter et al., 1980; Fuchs and Green, 1980, 1981; Franke et al., 1981 a, 1981 b, 1981 c; Milstone and McGuire, 1981; Wu and Rheinwald, 1981). A given epithelium or epithelial cell can therefore be characterized by the specific pattern of its cytokeratin components. Human Cytokeratin Polypeptides and Their Tissue Distribution Cytoskeletal preparations from epithelial tissues ex- tracted in high salt buffer and Triton X-l 00 are highly enriched in intermediate-sized filaments containing proteins that react specifically with antibodies to au- thentic epidermal [Y keratin (see, for example, Sun and Green, 1977; Fuchs and 1978, 1980, 1981; Franke et al., 1978b, 1980, 1981a, 1981 b, 1981~; Wu and Rheinwald, 1981) and that are recovered in filaments reconstituted in vitro from denatured mono- mers (Tezuka and Freedberg, 1972; Lee and Baden, 1976; Steinert et al., 1976, 1981 a; Sun and Green, 1978b; Gipson and Anderson, 1980; Milstone, 1981; Franke et al., 1981 b, 1981~; Renner et al., 1981). When such preparations are made from different hu- man tissues and examined by two-dimensional gel electrophoresis, with the aid of isoelectric focusing as well as nonequilibrium pH gradient electrophoresis for better resolution of basic polypeptides, complex pat- terns of cytokeratin polypeptides are found. The dis- tinct cytokeratin polypeptides that we have so far identified in various human tissues are schematically summarized and arranged according to their specific coordinates on two-dimensional gel electrophoresis in Figure 1, and the corresponding tissue distribution is shown in Table 1 A. Typically, the cytokeratin polypep- tides appear in series of isoelectric variants; all but the most basic spot usually represent phosphorylated

Abstract: We report the generation and analysis of functional data from multiple, diverse experiments performed on a targeted 1% of the human genome as part of the pilot phase of the ENCODE Project. These data have been further integrated and augmented by a number of evolutionary and computational analyses. Together, our results advance the collective knowledge about human genome function in several major areas. First, our studies provide convincing evidence that the genome is pervasively transcribed, such that the majority of its bases can be found in primary transcripts, including non-protein-coding transcripts, and those that extensively overlap one another. Second, systematic examination of transcriptional regulation has yielded new understanding about transcription start sites, including their relationship to specific regulatory sequences and features of chromatin accessibility and histone modification. Third, a more sophisticated view of chromatin structure has emerged, including its inter-relationship with DNA replication and transcriptional regulation. Finally, integration of these new sources of information, in particular with respect to mammalian evolution based on inter- and intra-species sequence comparisons, has yielded new mechanistic and evolutionary insights concerning the functional landscape of the human genome. Together, these studies are defining a path for pursuit of a more comprehensive characterization of human genome function.