TY - JOUR A1 - Müller, Janina A1 - Beckers, Mario A1 - Mußmann, Nina A1 - Bongaerts, Johannes A1 - Büchs, Jochen T1 - Elucidation of auxotrophic deficiencies of Bacillus pumilus DSM 18097 to develop a defined minimal medium JF - Microbial Cell Factories N2 - Background Culture media containing complex compounds like yeast extract or peptone show numerous disadvantages. The chemical composition of the complex compounds is prone to significant variations from batch to batch and quality control is difficult. Therefore, the use of chemically defined media receives more and more attention in commercial fermentations. This concept results in better reproducibility, it simplifies downstream processing of secreted products and enable rapid scale-up. Culturing bacteria with unknown auxotrophies in chemically defined media is challenging and often not possible without an extensive trial-and-error approach. In this study, a respiration activity monitoring system for shake flasks and its recent version for microtiter plates were used to clarify unknown auxotrophic deficiencies in the model organism Bacillus pumilus DSM 18097. Results Bacillus pumilus DSM 18097 was unable to grow in a mineral medium without the addition of complex compounds. Therefore, a rich chemically defined minimal medium was tested containing basically all vitamins, amino acids and nucleobases, which are essential ingredients of complex components. The strain was successfully cultivated in this medium. By monitoring of the respiration activity, nutrients were supplemented to and omitted from the rich chemically defined medium in a rational way, thus enabling a systematic and fast determination of the auxotrophic deficiencies. Experiments have shown that the investigated strain requires amino acids, especially cysteine or histidine and the vitamin biotin for growth. Conclusions The introduced method allows an efficient and rapid identification of unknown auxotrophic deficiencies and can be used to develop a simple chemically defined tailor-made medium. B. pumilus DSM 18097 was chosen as a model organism to demonstrate the method. However, the method is generally suitable for a wide range of microorganisms. By combining a systematic combinatorial approach based on monitoring the respiration activity with cultivation in microtiter plates, high throughput experiments with high information content can be conducted. This approach facilitates media development, strain characterization and cultivation of fastidious microorganisms in chemically defined minimal media while simultaneously reducing the experimental effort. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1186/s12934-018-0956-1 SN - 1475-2859 VL - 17 IS - 1 SP - Article No. 106 PB - BioMed Central ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lapitan, Denis G. A1 - Rogatkin, Dmitrii A. A1 - Persheyev, Sydulla K. A1 - Kotliar, Konstantin T1 - False spectra formation in the differential two-channel scheme of the laser Doppler flowmeter JF - Biomedizinische Technik N2 - Noise in the differential two-channel scheme of a classic laser Doppler flowmetry (LDF) instrument was studied. Formation of false spectral components in the output signal due to beating of electrical signals in the differential amplifier was found out. The improved block-diagram of the flowmeter was developed allowing to reduce the noise. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/bmt-2017-0060 SN - 0013-5585 VL - 63 IS - 4 SP - 439 EP - 444 PB - De Gruyter CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Eckert, Alexander A1 - Rudolph, Tobias A1 - Guo, Jiaqi A1 - Mang, Thomas A1 - Walther, Andreas T1 - Exceptionally Ductile and Tough Biomimetic Artificial Nacre with Gas Barrier Function JF - Advanced Materials N2 - Synthetic mimics of natural high-performance structural materials have shown great and partly unforeseen opportunities for the design of multifunctional materials. For nacre-mimetic nanocomposites, it has remained extraordinarily challenging to make ductile materials with high stretchability at high fractions of reinforcements, which is however of crucial importance for flexible barrier materials. Here, highly ductile and tough nacre-mimetic nanocomposites are presented, by implementing weak, but many hydrogen bonds in a ternary nacre-mimetic system consisting of two polymers (poly(vinyl amine) and poly(vinyl alcohol)) and natural nanoclay (montmorillonite) to provide efficient energy dissipation and slippage at high nanoclay content (50 wt%). Tailored interactions enable exceptional combinations of ductility (close to 50% strain) and toughness (up to 27.5 MJ m⁻³). Extensive stress whitening, a clear sign of high internal dynamics at high internal cohesion, can be observed during mechanical deformation, and the materials can be folded like paper into origami planes without fracture. Overall, the new levels of ductility and toughness are unprecedented in highly reinforced bioinspired nanocomposites and are of critical importance to future applications, e.g., as barrier materials needed for encapsulation and as a printing substrate for flexible organic electronics. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201802477 VL - 30 IS - 32 SP - Article number 1802477 PB - Wiley-VCH ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bung, Daniel Bernhard A1 - Valero, Daniel T1 - Re-aeration on stepped spillways with special consideration of entrained and entrapped air JF - Geosciences N2 - As with most high-velocity free-surface flows, stepped spillway flows become self-aerated when the drop height exceeds a critical value. Due to the step-induced macro-roughness, the flow field becomes more turbulent than on a similar smooth-invert chute. For this reason, cascades are oftentimes used as re-aeration structures in wastewater treatment. However, for stepped spillways as flood release structures downstream of deoxygenated reservoirs, gas transfer is also of crucial significance to meet ecological requirements. Prediction of mass transfer velocities becomes challenging, as the flow regime differs from typical previously studied flow conditions. In this paper, detailed air-water flow measurements are conducted on stepped spillway models with different geometry, with the aim to estimate the specific air-water interface. Re-aeration performances are determined by applying the absorption method. In contrast to earlier studies, the aerated water body is considered a continuous mixture up to a level where 75% air concentration is reached. Above this level, a homogenous surface wave field is considered, which is found to significantly affect the total air-water interface available for mass transfer. Geometrical characteristics of these surface waves are obtained from high-speed camera investigations. The results show that both the mean air concentration and the mean flow velocity have influence on the mass transfer. Finally, an empirical relationship for the mass transfer on stepped spillway models is proposed. Y1 - 2018 SN - 2076-3263 VL - 8 IS - 9 SP - Article number 333 PB - MDPI CY - Basel ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Miyamoto, Koichiro A1 - Seki, Kosuke A1 - Suto, Takeyuki A1 - Werner, Frederik A1 - Wagner, Torsten A1 - Schöning, Michael Josef A1 - Yoshinobu, Tatsuo T1 - Improved spatial resolution of the chemical imaging sensor with a hybrid illumination that suppresses lateral diffusion of photocarriers JF - Sensor and Actuators B: Chemical N2 - The chemical imaging sensor is a semiconductor-based chemical sensor capable of visualizing pH and ion distributions. The spatial resolution depends on the lateral diffusion of photocarriers generated by illumination of the semiconductor substrate. In this study, two types of optical setups, one based on a bundle of optical fibers and the other based on a binocular tube head, were developed to project a hybrid illumination of a modulated light beam and a ring-shaped constant illumination onto the sensor plate. An improved spatial resolution was realized by the ring-shaped constant illumination, which suppressed lateral diffusion of photocarriers by enhanced recombination due to the increased carrier concentration. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.snb.2018.07.016 SN - 0925-4005 VL - 273 SP - 1328 EP - 1333 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Rittweger, Jörn A1 - Albracht, Kirsten A1 - Flück, Martin A1 - Ruoss, Severin A1 - Brocca, Lorenza A1 - Longa, Emanuela A1 - Moriggi, Manuela A1 - Seynnes, Olivier A1 - Di Giulio, Irene A1 - Tenori, Leonardo A1 - Vignoli, Alessia A1 - Capri, Miriam A1 - Gelfi, Cecilia A1 - Luchinat, Claudio A1 - Franceschi, Claudio A1 - Bottinelli, Roberto A1 - Cerretelli, Paolo A1 - Narici, Marco T1 - Sarcolab pilot study into skeletal muscle’s adaptation to longterm spaceflight JF - npj Microgravity Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41526-018-0052-1 SN - 2373-8065 VL - 4 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 9 PB - Nature Portfolio ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schwabedal, Justus T. C. A1 - Sippel, Daniel A1 - Brandt, Moritz D. A1 - Bialonski, Stephan T1 - Automated Classification of Sleep Stages and EEG Artifacts in Mice with Deep Learning N2 - Sleep scoring is a necessary and time-consuming task in sleep studies. In animal models (such as mice) or in humans, automating this tedious process promises to facilitate long-term studies and to promote sleep biology as a data-driven f ield. We introduce a deep neural network model that is able to predict different states of consciousness (Wake, Non-REM, REM) in mice from EEG and EMG recordings with excellent scoring results for out-of-sample data. Predictions are made on epochs of 4 seconds length, and epochs are classified as artifactfree or not. The model architecture draws on recent advances in deep learning and in convolutional neural networks research. In contrast to previous approaches towards automated sleep scoring, our model does not rely on manually defined features of the data but learns predictive features automatically. We expect deep learning models like ours to become widely applied in different fields, automating many repetitive cognitive tasks that were previously difficult to tackle. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1809.08443 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Ferrein, Alexander T1 - ERIKA—Early Robotics Introduction at Kindergarten Age JF - Multimodal Technologies Interact N2 - In this work, we report on our attempt to design and implement an early introduction to basic robotics principles for children at kindergarten age. One of the main challenges of this effort is to explain complex robotics contents in a way that pre-school children could follow the basic principles and ideas using examples from their world of experience. What sets apart our effort from other work is that part of the lecturing is actually done by a robot itself and that a quiz at the end of the lesson is done using robots as well. The humanoid robot Pepper from Softbank, which is a great platform for human–robot interaction experiments, was used to present a lecture on robotics by reading out the contents to the children making use of its speech synthesis capability. A quiz in a Runaround-game-show style after the lecture activated the children to recap the contents they acquired about how mobile robots work in principle. In this quiz, two LEGO Mindstorm EV3 robots were used to implement a strongly interactive scenario. Besides the thrill of being exposed to a mobile robot that would also react to the children, they were very excited and at the same time very concentrated. We got very positive feedback from the children as well as from their educators. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of only few attempts to use a robot like Pepper not as a tele-teaching tool, but as the teacher itself in order to engage pre-school children with complex robotics contents. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/mti2040064 SN - 2414-4088 VL - 2 IS - 4 PB - MDPI CY - Basel ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Hofmann, Till A1 - Mataré, Victor A1 - Neumann, Tobias A1 - Schönitz, Sebastian A1 - Henke, Christoph A1 - Limpert, Nicolas A1 - Niemueller, Tim A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Jeschke, Sabina A1 - Lakemeyer, Gerhard T1 - Enhancing Software and Hardware Reliability for a Successful Participation in the RoboCup Logistics League 2017 Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-3-030-00308-1 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00308-1_40 N1 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11175 SP - 486 EP - 497 PB - Springer CY - Cham ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ferrein, Alexander A1 - Schiffer, Stefan A1 - Kallweit, Stephan T1 - The ROSIN Education Concept - Fostering ROS Industrial-Related Robotics Education in Europe T2 - ROBOT 2017: Third Iberian Robotics Conference Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-3-319-70836-2 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70836-2_31 N1 - Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 694; (AISC, volume 694) SP - 370 EP - 381 PB - Springer CY - Cham ER -