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    Impacts of global change on water-related sectors and society in a trans-boundary central European river basin – Part 2: From eco-hydrology to water demand management
    (München : European Geopyhsical Union, 2007) Conradt, T.; Kaltofen, M.; Hentschel, M.; Hattermann, F.F.; Wechsung, F.
    This second part of the paper presents the details of the eco-hydrological model SWIM simulating the natural water supply and its coupling to WBalMo, a water management model. Based on the climate scenarios of the STAR model, SWIM simulates the natural water and matter fluxes for the entire Elbe River area. All relevant processes are modelled for hydrotopes and the resulting discharges are accumulated in subbasins. The output data are input for the water management model WBalMo and the quality models Moneris and QSim. WBalMo takes storage management, inputs and withdrawals into account and analyses how demands by industry, power plants and households will be met at changing natural supply conditions. Some of the first results shall be presented here.
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    Small-scale mixing processes enhancing troposphere-to-stratosphere transport by pyro-cumulonimbus storms
    (Göttingen : Copernicus GmbH, 2007) Luderer, G.; Trentmann, J.; Hungershöfer, K.; Herzog, M.; Fromm, M.; Andreae, M.O.
    Deep convection induced by large forest fires is an efficient mechanism for transport of aerosol particles and trace gases into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UT/LS). For many pyro-cumulonimbus clouds (pyroCbs) as well as other cases of severe convection without fire forcing, radiometric observations of cloud tops in the thermal infrared (IR) reveal characteristic structures, featuring a region of relatively high brightness temperatures (warm center) surrounded by a U-shaped region of low brightness temperatures. We performed a numerical simulation of a specific case study of pyroCb using a non-hydrostatic cloud resolving model with a two-moment cloud microphysics parameterization and a prognostic turbulence scheme. The model is able to reproduce the thermal IR structure as observed from satellite radiometry. Our findings establish a close link between the observed temperature pattern and small-scale mixing processes atop and downwind of the overshooting dome of the pyroCb. Such small-scale mixing processes are strongly enhanced by the formation and breaking of a stationary gravity wave induced by the overshoot. They are found to increase the stratospheric penetration of the smoke by up to almost 30 K and thus are of major significance for irreversible transport of forest fire smoke into the lower stratosphere.
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    Large-scale hydrological modelling and the Water Framework Directive and Floods Directive of the European Union - 10th Workshop on Large-Scale Hydrological Modelling
    (München : European Geopyhsical Union, 2007) Lindenschmidt, K.-E.; Hattermann, F.; Mohaupt, V.; Merz, B.; Kundzewicz, Z.W.; Bronstert, A.
    In December 2000, the Water Framework Directive (WFD) of the European Union (EU) was enforced (EC, 2000) to provide a new legislative basis for water management in Europe. The main goal of the WFD is the implementation of river basin water management plans in which comprehensive studies of the current status of the surface and ground water bodies must be reported and management programs must be enforced with cost-effective measures with which a good ecological condition of the water bodies can be attained and sustained.
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    Impacts of global change on water-related sectors and society in a trans-boundary central European river basin – Part 1: Project framework and impacts on agriculture
    (München : European Geopyhsical Union, 2007) Hattermann, F.F.; Gömann, H.; Conradt, T.; Kaltofen, M.; Kreins, P.; Wechsung, F.
    Central Europe, the focus region of this study, is a region in transition, climatically from maritime to continental and politically from formerly more planning-oriented to more market-oriented management regimes, and in terms of climate change from regions of increasing precipitation in the west and north of Europe to regions of decreasing precipitation in central and southern Europe. The Elbe basin, a trans-boundary catchment flowing from the Czech Republic through Germany into the North Sea, was selected to investigate the possible impacts of global change on crop yields and water resources in this region. For technical reasons, the paper has been split into two parts, the first showing the overall model concept, the model set-up for the agricultural sector, and first results linking eco-hydrological and agro-economic tools for the German part of the basin. The second part describes the model set-up for simulating water supply and demand linking eco-hydrological and water management tools for the entire basin including the Czech part.
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    Phase noise and jitter modeling for fractional-N PLLs
    (Göttingen : Copernicus, 2007) Osmany, S.A.; Herzel, F.; Schmalz, K.; Winkler, W.
    We present an analytical phase noise model for fractional-N phase-locked loops (PLL) with emphasis on integrated RF synthesizers in the GHz range. The noise of the crystal reference, the voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), the loop filter, the charge pump, and the sigma-delta modulator (SDM) is filtered by the PLL operation. We express the rms phase error (jitter) in terms of phase noise of the reference, the VCO phase noise and the third-order loop filter parameters. In addition, we consider OFDM systems, where the PLL phase noise is reduced by digital signal processing after down-conversion of the RF signal to baseband. The rms phase error is discussed as a function of the loop parameters. Our model drastically simplifies the noise optimization of the PLL loop dynamics.
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    Expression stability of commonly used reference genes in canine articular connective tissues
    (London : BioMed Central, 2007) Ayers, Duncan; Clements, Dylan N.; Salway, Fiona; Day, Philip J.R.
    Background: The quantification of gene expression in tissue samples requires the use of reference genes to normalise transcript numbers between different samples. Reference gene stability may vary between different tissues, and between the same tissue in different disease states. We evaluated the stability of 9 reference genes commonly used in human gene expression studies. Realtime reverse transcription PCR and a mathematical algorithm were used to establish which reference genes were most stably expressed in normal and diseased canine articular tissues and two canine cell lines stimulated with lipolysaccaride (LPS). Results: The optimal reference genes for comparing gene expression data between normal and diseased infrapatella fat pad were RPL13A and YWHAZ (M = 0.56). The ideal reference genes for comparing normal and osteoarthritic (OA) cartilage were RPL13A and SDHA (M = 0.57). The best reference genes for comparing normal and ruptured canine cranial cruciate ligament were B2M and TBP (M = 0.59). The best reference genes for normalising gene expression data from normal and LPS stimulated cell lines were SDHA and YWHAZ (K6) or SDHA and HMBS (DH82), which had expression stability (M) values of 0.05 (K6) and 0.07 (DH82) respectively. The number of reference genes required to reduce pairwise variation (V) to <0.20 was 4 for cell lines, 5 for cartilage, 7 for cranial cruciate ligament and 8 for fat tissue. Reference gene stability was not related to the level of gene expression. Conclusion: The reference genes demonstrating the most stable expression within each different canine articular tissue were identified, but no single reference gene was identified as having stable expression in all different tissue types. This study underlines the necessity to select reference genes on the basis of tissue and disease specific expression profile evaluation and highlights the requirement for the identification of new reference genes with greater expression stability for use in canine articular tissue gene expression studies.
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    The DeoR-type transcriptional regulator SugR acts as a repressor for genes encoding the phosphoenolpyruvate:sugar phosphotransferase system (PTS) in Corynebacterium glutamicum
    (London : BioMed Central, 2007) Gaigalat, Lars; Schlüter, Jan-Philip; Hartmann, Michelle; Mormann, Sascha; Tauch, Andreas; Pühler, Alfred; Kalinowski, Jörn
    Background: The major uptake system responsible for the transport of fructose, glucose, and sucrose in Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 13032 is the phosphoenolpyruvate:sugar phosphotransferase system (PTS). The genes encoding PTS components, namely ptsI, ptsH, and ptsF belong to the fructose-PTS gene cluster, whereas ptsG and ptsS are located in two separate regions of the C. glutamicum genome. Due to the localization within and adjacent to the fructose-PTS gene cluster, two genes coding for DeoR-type transcriptional regulators, cg2118 and sugR, are putative candidates involved in the transcriptional regulation of the fructose-PTS cluster genes. Results: Four transcripts of the extended fructose-PTS gene cluster that comprise the genes sugRcg2116, ptsI, cg2118-fruK-ptsF, and ptsH, respectively, were characterized. In addition, it was shown that transcription of the fructose-PTS gene cluster is enhanced during growth on glucose or fructose when compared to acetate. Subsequently, the two genes sugR and cg2118 encoding for DeoR-type regulators were mutated and PTS gene transcription was found to be strongly enhanced in the presence of acetate only in the sugR deletion mutant. The SugR regulon was further characterized by microarray hybridizations using the sugR mutant and its parental strain, revealing that also the PTS genes ptsG and ptsS belong to this regulon. Binding of purified SugR repressor protein to a 21 bp sequence identified the SugR binding site as an AC-rich motif. The two experimentally identified SugR binding sites in the fructose-PTS gene cluster are located within or downstream of the mapped promoters, typical for transcriptional repressors. Effector studies using electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSA) revealed the fructose PTS-specific metabolite fructose-1-phosphate (F-1-P) as a highly efficient, negative effector of the SugR repressor, acting in the micromolar range. Beside F-1-P, other sugar-phosphates like fructose-1,6-bisphosphate (F-1,6- P) and glucose-6-phosphate (G-6-P) also negatively affect SugR-binding, but in millimolar concentrations.
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    Bibliothek 2.0 – Wird alles anders?
    (Berlin : Walter de Gruyter, 2007) Danowski, Patrick; Heller, Lambert
    Following up their article „Bibliothek 2.0 – Die Zukunft der Bibliothek?“ („Library 2.0 – The future of the library?“) (2006), Patrick Danowski and Lambert Heller, responsible for the main focus of this issue, give an outline of some recently discussed library 2.0 topics, especially in respect to the professional community in germany. Some characteristic questions and problems of the development, opening and networking of library Services and information are mentioned.
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    Adaptive smoothing of digital images: The R package adimpro
    (Los Angeles, Calif. : UCLA, Dept. of Statistics, 2007) Polzehl, J.; Tabelow, K.
    Digital imaging has become omnipresent in the past years with a bulk of applications ranging from medical imaging to photography. When pushing the limits of resolution and sensitivity noise has ever been a major issue. However, commonly used non-adaptive filters can do noise reduction at the cost of a reduced effective spatial resolution only. Here we present a new package adimpro for R, which implements the propagationseparation approach by (Polzehl arid Spokoiriy 2006) for smoothing digital images. This method naturally adapts to different structures of different size in the image and thus avoids oversmoothing edges and fine structures. We extend the method for imaging data with spatial correlation. Furthermore we show how the estimation of the dependence between variance and mean value can be included. We illustrate the use of the package through some examples.
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    Plasma-assisted modulation of morphology and composition in Tin oxide nanostructures for sensing applications
    (Saarbrücke : Leibniz-Institut für Neue Materialien, 2007) Mathur, Sanjay; Ganesan, Rajesh; Ruegamer, Thomas; Shen, Hao; Barth, Sven
    [no abstract available]