Open Access

Plants, fungi and algae are important components of global biodiversity and are fundamental to all ecosystems. They are the basis for human well-being, providing food, materials and medicines. Specimens of all three groups of organisms are accommodated in herbaria, where they are commonly referred to as botanical specimens.The large number of specimens in herbaria provides an ample, permanent and continuously improving knowledge base on these organisms and an indispensable source for the analysis of the distribution of species in space and time critical for current and future research relating to global biodiversity. In order to make full use of this resource, a research infrastructure has to be built that grants comprehensive and free access to the information in herbaria and botanical collections in general. This can be achieved through digitization of the botanical objects and associated data.The botanical research community can count on a long-standing tradition of collaboration among institutions and individuals. It agreed on data standards and standard services even before the advent of computerization and information networking, an example being the Index Herbariorum as a global registry of herbaria helping towards the unique identification of specimens cited in the literature.In the spirit of this collaborative history, 51 representatives from 30 institutions advocate to start the digitization of botanical collections with the overall wall-to-wall digitization of the flat objects stored in German herbaria. Germany has 70 herbaria holding almost 23 million specimens according to a national survey carried out in 2019. 87% of these specimens are not yet digitized. Experiences from other countries like France, the Netherlands, Finland, the US and Australia show that herbaria can be comprehensively and cost-efficiently digitized in a relatively short time due to established workflows and protocols for the high-throughput digitization of flat objects.Most of the herbaria are part of a university (34), fewer belong to municipal museums (10) or state museums (8), six herbaria belong to institutions also supported by federal funds such as Leibniz institutes, and four belong to non-governmental organizations. A common data infrastructure must therefore integrate different kinds of institutions.Making full use of the data gained by digitization requires the set-up of a digital infrastructure for storage, archiving, content indexing and networking as well as standardized access for the scientific use of digital objects. A standards-based portfolio of technical components has already been developed and successfully tested by the Biodiversity Informatics Community over the last two decades, comprising among others access protocols, collection databases, portals, tools for semantic enrichment and annotation, international networking, storage and archiving in accordance with international standards. This was achieved through the funding by national and international programs and initiatives, which also paved the road for the German contribution to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).Herbaria constitute a large part of the German botanical collections that also comprise living collections in botanical gardens and seed banks, DNA- and tissue samples, specimens preserved in fluids or on microscope slides and more. Once the herbaria are digitized, these resources can be integrated, adding to the value of the overall research infrastructure. The community has agreed on tasks that are shared between the herbaria, as the German GBIF model already successfully demonstrates.We have compiled nine scientific use cases of immediate societal relevance for an integrated infrastructure of botanical collections. They address accelerated biodiversity discovery and research, biomonitoring and conservation planning, biodiversity modelling, the generation of trait information, automated image recognition by artificial intelligence, automated pathogen detection, contextualization by interlinking objects, enabling provenance research, as well as education, outreach and citizen science.We propose to start this initiative now in order to valorize German botanical collections as a vital part of a worldwide biodiversity data pool.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder frequent at old age characterized by atrophy of the nigrostriatal projection. Overexpression and A53T-mutation of the presynaptic, vesicle-associated chaperone alpha-synuclein are known to cause early-onset autosomal dominant PD. We previously generated mice with transgenic overexpression of human A53T-alpha-synuclein (A53T-SNCA) in dopaminergic substantia nigra neurons as a model of early PD. To elucidate the early and late effects of A53T-alpha-synuclein on the proteome of dopaminergic nerve terminals in the striatum, we now investigated expression profiles of young and old mice using two-dimensional fluorescence difference in gel electrophoresis (2D-DIGE) and mass spectrometry. In total, 15 proteins were upregulated and 2 downregulated. Mice before the onset of motor anomalies showed an upregulation of the spot containing 14-3-3 proteins, in particular the epsilon isoform, as well as altered levels of chaperones, vesicle trafficking and bioenergetics proteins. In old mice, the persistent upregulation of 14-3-3 proteins was aggravated by an increase of glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) suggesting astrogliosis due to initial neurodegeneration. Independent immunoblots corroborated GFAP upregulation and 14-3-3 upregulation for the epsilon isoform, and also detected significant eta and gamma changes. Only for 14-3-3 epsilon a corresponding mRNA increase was observed in midbrain, suggesting it is transcribed in dopaminergic perikarya and accumulates as protein in presynapses, together with A53T-SNCA. 14-3-3 proteins associate with alpha-synuclein in vitro and in pathognomonic Lewy bodies of PD brains. They act as chaperones in signaling, dopamine synthesis and stress response. Thus, their early dysregulation probably reflects a response to alpha-synuclein toxicity. Electronic supplementary material: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00702-011-0717-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

We have performed the first measurement of the coherent ψ(2S) photo production cross section in ultraperipheral Pb–Pb collisions at the LHC. This charmonium excited state is reconstructed via the ψ(2S) → l +l − and ψ(2S) → J/ψπ+π− decays, where the J/ψ decays into two leptons. The analysis is based on an event sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 22 μb−1. The cross section for coherent ψ(2S) production in the rapidity interval −0.9 < y < 0.9 is dσcoh ψ(2S)/dy = 0.83±0.19 stat+syst mb. The ψ(2S) to J/ψ coherent cross section ratio is 0.34+0.08 −0.07(stat + syst). The obtained results are compared to predictions from theoretical models.

Aus 4 Profilen durch den Laerer Sinterkalk wurden 33 Proben pollenanalytisch untersucht. Zwei Zähltabellen geben für jede einzelne dieser Proben den Gehalt an Pollen und Sporen. Zwei Diagramme stellen die Ergebnisse dieser qualitativen und quantitativen Analysen graphisch dar. Neben den Pollenkörnern der gebräuchlichen 11 Baumarten wurden 24 verschiedene Nichtbaumpollen-Gruppen ausgewertet. Als ältester Zeitabschnitt ließ sich die mindestens 10000 Jahre alte sog. "Jüngste Dryaszeit" feststellen, gekennzeichnet durch eine subarktische Tundra. Die darauf folgenden Zeitabschnitte Präboreal, Boreal, Atlantikum, Subboreal und Subatlantikum konnten in einem oder mehreren der Profile gefaßt werden. In günstig gelagerten Fällen wurden darüber hinaus Beziehungen angedeutet, die zwischen der Bildung dieses Sinterkalklagers und der Besiedlung durch den Menschen bestehen.

A measurement of the transverse momentum spectra of jets in Pb-Pb collisions at sNN−−−√=2.76 TeV is reported. Jets are reconstructed from charged particles using the anti-kT jet algorithm with jet resolution parameters R of 0.2 and 0.3 in pseudo-rapidity |η|<0.5. The transverse momentum pT of charged particles is measured down to 0.15 GeV/c which gives access to the low pT fragments of the jet. Jets found in heavy-ion collisions are corrected event-by-event for average background density and on an inclusive basis (via unfolding) for residual background fluctuations and detector effects. A strong suppression of jet production in central events with respect to peripheral events is observed. The suppression is found to be similar to the suppression of charged hadrons, which suggests that substantial energy is radiated at angles larger than the jet resolution parameter R=0.3 considered in the analysis. The fragmentation bias introduced by selecting jets with a high pT leading particle, which rejects jets with a soft fragmentation pattern, has a similar effect on the jet yield for central and peripheral events. The ratio of jet spectra with R=0.2 and R=0.3 is found to be similar in Pb-Pb and simulated PYTHIA pp events, indicating no strong broadening of the radial jet structure in the reconstructed jets with R<0.3.