2,227 research outputs found
Wie im Barbieland? Rechte und linke Identitätspolitiken in der EU
No full textRichard Rorty hat seine Diagnose des Aufstiegs der Kulturlinken auf Kosten einer reformorientierten Linke vor einem Vierteljahrhundert verfasst. Inzwischen haben wir solche Kulturkämpfe auch in Europa. Zudem ist Identitätspolitik nicht länger ein alleiniges Merkmal der Linken, sondern auch auf Seiten der Rechten. Begleitet werden diese Identitätspolitiken jeweils von einer Wirtschaftspolitik, die sich an neoliberalen Vorgaben orientiert. Die These von Dirk Jörke und Torben Schwuchow ist es, dass dies insbesondere Verengung finanz- und wirtschaftspolitischer Handlungsfähigkeiten geschuldet ist. In diesen Bereichen besteht wenig Spielraum für parteipolitische Agenden, sodass der politische Wettbewerb auf andere Felder, wie Identitätspolitiken ausweicht
Is the C-terminal insertional signal in Gram-negative bacterial outer membrane proteins species-specific or not?
No full textAbstract Background In Gram-negative bacteria, the outer membrane is composed of an asymmetric lipid bilayer of phopspholipids and lipopolysaccharides, and the transmembrane proteins that reside in this membrane are almost exclusively β-barrel proteins. These proteins are inserted into the membrane by a highly conserved and essential machinery, the BAM complex. It recognizes its substrates, unfolded outer membrane proteins (OMPs), through a C-terminal motif that has been speculated to be species-specific, based on theoretical and experimental results from only two species, Escherichia coli and Neisseria meningitidis, where it was shown on the basis of individual sequences and motifs that OMPs from the one cannot easily be over expressed in the other, unless the C-terminal motif was adapted. In order to determine whether this species specificity is a general phenomenon, we undertook a large-scale bioinformatics study on all predicted OMPs from 437 fully sequenced proteobacterial strains. Results We were able to verify the incompatibility reported between Escherichia coli and Neisseria meningitidis, using clustering techniques based on the pairwise Hellinger distance between sequence spaces for the C-terminal motifs of individual organisms. We noticed that the amino acid position reported to be responsible for this incompatibility between Escherichia coli and Neisseria meningitidis does not play a major role for determining species specificity of OMP recognition by the BAM complex. Instead, we found that the signal is more diffuse, and that for most organism pairs, the difference between the signals is hard to detect. Notable exceptions are the Neisseriales, and Helicobacter spp. For both of these organism groups, we describe the specific sequence requirements that are at the basis of the observed difference. Conclusions Based on the finding that the differences between the recognition motifs of almost all organisms are small, we assume that heterologous overexpression of almost all OMPs should be feasible in E. coli and other Gram-negative bacterial model organisms. This is relevant especially for biotechnology applications, where recombinant OMPs are used e.g. for the development of vaccines. For the species in which the motif is significantly different, we identify the residues mainly responsible for this difference that can now be changed in heterologous expression experiments to yield functional proteins.</p
Bacterial extracellular polysaccharides
No full textExtracellular polysaccharides are as structurally and functionally diverse as the bacteria that synthesise them. They can be present in many forms, including cell-bound capsular polysaccharides, unbound "slime", and as O-antigen component of lipopolysaccharide, with an equally wide range of biological functions. These include resistance to desiccation, protection against nonspecific and specific host immunity, and adherence. Unsurprisingly then, much effort has been made to catalogue the enormous structural complexity of the extracellular polysaccharides made possible by the wide assortment of available monosaccharide combinations, non-carbohydrate residues, and linkage types, and to elucidate their biosynthesis and export. In addition, the work is driven by the commercial potential of these microbial substances in food, pharmaceutics and biomedical industries. Most recently, bacteria-mediated environmental restoration and bioleaching have been attracting much attention owing to their potential to remediate environmental effluents produced by the mining and metallurgy industries. In spite of technological advances in chemistry, molecular biology and imaging techniques that allowed for considerable expansion of knowledge pertaining to the bacterial surface polysaccharides, current understanding of the mechanisms of synthesis and regulation of extracellular polysaccharides is yet to fully explain their structural intricacy and functional variability
Is 'Die Linke' compatible with pluralist democracy in Germany?
No full textAs long as the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) was able to capitalize on East German discontent and was seen as the articulation of East German interests, it remained as a regional party limited in its radius of action. Only due to the merger with a West German protest movement to “Die Linke (The Left) it developed to an all-German socialist party which by changing the system into a five-party-system is exerting influence on the power constellations in the Federal Republic of Germany. Within the PDS as well as within the “Linke programmatic debates took and take place between modernizers and hardliners, between advocates of a “democratic socialism and of more “social justice. The plea for a democratic socialism is being linked to the “democratization of democracy which raises suspicion about the attitude of the party towards the pluralist democracy. Several elements induce to consider the “Linke as an extremist party, such as the often repeated claim to surmount the system and the presence of extremist subgroups within the party. Extremism does not necessarily mean hostility towards the constitution as the heart of the freedom-based pluralist democracy. The “Linke even tries to instrumentalize the constitution in function of its ideological postulations. The party displays an ambivalent face, not only because of the pluralist debate within its own ranks, but also because of its aims of putting the system into question. Its extremism in aim and rhetoric is above any suspicion of violent striving to subvert the system and therefore escapes the labeling of being unconstitutional. The “Linke is one of the voices which make the system to what it is, a pluralist democracy giving different actors the opportunity to articulate particular interests.status: Publishe
Repositioning Architecture in the Digital: Proceedings of the 7th annual conference of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre
No full textPublication at the occasion of the 7th annual conference of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre with contributions by Georg Vrachliotis, Armin Linke, Marina Otero Verzier, Ludo Groen, Martin Kuijpers, Dirk van den Heuvel and Soscha Monteiro de Jesus.Space & Typ
Entertainer: Pieter-Dirk Uys
No full textThis booklet celebrates the life and work of Pieter-Dirk Uys, internationally acclaimed playwright, author, role-model and one of South Africa's living treasures
Entertainer: Pieter-Dirk Uys
No full textThis booklet celebrates the life and work of Pieter-Dirk Uys, internationally acclaimed playwright, author, role-model and one of South Africa's living treasures
HHomp--prediction and classification of outer membrane proteins
No full textOuter membrane proteins (OMPs) are the transmembrane proteins found in the outer membranes of Gram-negative bacteria, mitochondria and plastids. Most prediction methods have focused on analogous features, such as alternating hydrophobicity patterns. Here, we start from the observation that almost all beta-barrel OMPs are related by common ancestry. We identify proteins as OMPs by detecting their homologous relationships to known OMPs using sequence similarity. Given an input sequence, HHomp builds a profile hidden Markov model (HMM) and compares it with an OMP database by pairwise HMM comparison, integrating OMP predictions by PROFtmb. A crucial ingredient is the OMP database, which contains profile HMMs for over 20,000 putative OMP sequences. These were collected with the exhaustive, transitive homology detection method HHsenser, starting from 23 representative OMPs in the PDB database. In a benchmark on TransportDB, HHomp detects 63.5% of the true positives before including the first false positive. This is 70% more than PROFtmb, four times more than BOMP and 10 times more than TMB-Hunt. In Escherichia coli, HHomp identifies 57 out of 59 known OMPs and correctly assigns them to their functional subgroups. HHomp can be accessed at http://toolkit.tuebingen.mpg.de/hhomp
Entertainer: Pieter-Dirk Uys
No full textThis booklet celebrates the life and work of Pieter-Dirk Uys, internationally acclaimed playwright, author, role-model and one of South Africa's living treasures
Formal Techniques and Self/Other Relations in the Novels of Dirk Bogarde
No full textThe thesis foregrounds the distinctive contribution Dirk Bogarde made to
contemporary writing in a second career that developed in parallel to his screen
commitments. It dispels the notion that Bogarde followed a familiar path as an actor
who wrote books. Instead it establishes his reputation as an innovative writer whose
formal technique was substantially influenced by the textual systems of cinema and
the cross-fertilisation from acting to writing.
In examining the formative factors that steered Bogarde towards authorship, the
thesis addresses the role of performance as a generative factor in the evolution of the
novels, establishing a discursive link with Bakhtinian dialogism, and specifically,
transgredience as a formal imperative. Secondly, it affords a critical insight into why
the major concerns with staging and performativity preoccupy his writing career.
The thesis claims that Bogarde was an empirically dialogical writer whose use
of camera-eye narration fostered the proliferation of competing discourses across the
fiction. This formal dynamic is centred on the relationship between stages and
dialogism, which incorporates the work of Erving Goffinan as a complementary
critique to Bakhtinian theory with its emphasis on self-presentation. The concern
with socially-constructed behaviour leads the thesis to address the associated issues of
stereotyping and 'otherness', which in terms of body politics is articulated by the
mono logic drive to confine the sexual 'other' to a fixed representation.
Bogarde's ability to draw on cinematic and performance techniques identifies
an area of expertise unavailable to most other writers. This is an unusual repository
of skills to bring to writing which is why the thesis makes the claim for his singular
achievement as a contemporary author. There are fruitful points of intersection to be
explored in this respect with the work of Christopher Isherwood, whom Bogarde read
and admired, as a basis for further research. It is hoped that the thesis will play its
part in opening up new possibilities for Bogarde's writing to be re-visited by future
critics
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