| 1. |
- Choudhary, Akash, et al.
(författare)
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Orientational dynamics and rheology of active suspensions in weakly viscoelastic flows
- 2023
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Ingår i: Communications Physics. - : Springer Nature. - 2399-3650. ; 6:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Microswimmers in a fluid are an example of an active suspension whereby the system is driven out of equilibrium though the interaction of the microswimmers with their surrounding environment. Here, the authors study the orientational microstructure of active suspensions in a viscoelastic fluid and show how the activity of the microswimmers can alter the bulk properties. Microswimmer suspensions in Newtonian fluids exhibit unusual macroscale properties, such as a superfluidic behavior, which can be harnessed to perform work at microscopic scales. Since most biological fluids are non-Newtonian, here we study the rheology of a microswimmer suspension in a weakly viscoelastic shear flow. At the individual level, we find that the viscoelastic stresses generated by activity substantially modify the Jeffery orbits well-known from Newtonian fluids. The orientational dynamics depends on the swimmer type; especially pushers can resist flow-induced rotation and align at an angle with the flow. To analyze its impact on bulk rheology, we study a dilute microswimmer suspension in the presence of random tumbling and rotational diffusion. Strikingly, swimmer activity and its elastic response in polymeric fluids alter the orientational distribution and substantially amplify the swimmer-induced viscosity. This suggests that pusher suspensions reach the superfluidic regime at lower volume fractions compared to a Newtonian fluid with identical viscosity.
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| 2. |
- Einhauser, Sebastian, et al.
(författare)
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Time Trend in SARS-CoV-2 Seropositivity, Surveillance Detection- and Infection Fatality Ratio until Spring 2021 in the Tirschenreuth County-Results from a Population-Based Longitudinal Study in Germany
- 2022
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Ingår i: Viruses. - : MDPI AG. - 1999-4915. ; 14:6
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Herein, we provide results from a prospective population-based longitudinal follow-up (FU) SARS-CoV-2 serosurveillance study in Tirschenreuth, the county which was hit hardest in Germany in spring 2020 and early 2021. Of 4203 individuals aged 14 years or older enrolled at baseline (BL, June 2020), 3546 participated at FU1 (November 2020) and 3391 at FU2 (April 2021). Key metrics comprising standardized seroprevalence, surveillance detection ratio (SDR), infection fatality ratio (IFR) and success of the vaccination campaign were derived using the Roche N- and S-Elecsys anti-SARS-CoV-2 test together with a self-administered questionnaire. N-seropositivity at BL was 9.2% (1st wave). While we observed a low new seropositivity between BL and FU1 (0.9%), the combined 2nd and 3rd wave accounted for 6.1% new N-seropositives between FU1 and FU2 (ever seropositives at FU2: 15.4%). The SDR decreased from 5.4 (BL) to 1.1 (FU2) highlighting the success of massively increased testing in the population. The IFR based on a combination of serology and registration data resulted in 3.3% between November 2020 and April 2021 compared to 2.3% until June 2020. Although IFRs were consistently higher at FU2 compared to BL across age-groups, highest among individuals aged 70+ (18.3% versus 10.7%, respectively), observed differences were within statistical uncertainty bounds. While municipalities with senior care homes showed a higher IFR at BL (3.0% with senior care home vs. 0.7% w/o), this effect diminished at FU2 (3.4% vs. 2.9%). In April 2021 (FU2), vaccination rate in the elderly was high (>77.4%, age-group 80+).
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| 3. |
- Kimanius, Dari, 1985-
(författare)
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Peering Beyond the Noise in Experimental Biophysical Data
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Experimental protein structure determination methods make up a fundamental part of our understanding of biological systems. Manual interpretation of the output from these methods has been made obsolete by the sheer size and complexity of the acquired data. Instead, computational methods are becoming essential for this task and with the advent of high-throughput methods the efficiency and robustness of these methods are a major concern. This work focuses on the computational challenge of efficiently extracting statistically supported information from noisy or significantly reduced experimental data.Small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) is a method capable of probing structural information with many experimental benefits compared to alternative methods. However, the acquired data is a noisy reduction of a large set of structural features into a low-dimensional signal-mixture, which significantly limits its interpretability. Due to this SAXS has this far been limited to conclusions about large-scale structural features, like radius of gyration or the oligomeric state of the sample. In this thesis I present an approach where SAXS data is used to guide molecular dynamics simulations to explore experimentally relevant conformational states. The experimental data is fed into the simulations through a metadynamics protocol, which explores the experimental data through conformational sampling subject to thermodynamic restraints. I show how this approach makes it possible to use SAXS to produce atomic-resolution models and make further-reaching conclusions about the underlying biological system, in particular by showcasing de novo folding of a small protein.Another experimental method that generates noisy and reduced data is cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM). Due to recent development in the field, the computational burden has become a considerable bottleneck, which greatly limits the throughput of the method. I present computational techniques to alleviate this burden through the use of specialized algorithms capable of efficient execution on graphics processing units (GPUs). This work improves the computational efficiency of the entire pipeline by several orders of magnitude and significantly advances the overall efficiency and applicability of the method. I show how this enables the development of improved algorithms with increased capabilities for extracting relevant biological information form the data. Several such improvements are presented that significantly increase the resolution of the refinement results and provide additional information about the dynamics of the system. Additionally, I present an application of these methods to data collected on a biogenesis intermediate of the mitochondrial ribosome. The new structures provide insights into the timing of the rRNA folding and protein incorporation as well as the role of two previously unknown assembly factors during the final stages of ribosome maturation.
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| 4. |
- Morris, Andrew P, et al.
(författare)
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Trans-ethnic kidney function association study reveals putative causal genes and effects on kidney-specific disease aetiologies
- 2019
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Ingår i: Nature Communications. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2041-1723. ; 10:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects ~10% of the global population, with considerable ethnic differences in prevalence and aetiology. We assemble genome-wide association studies of estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), a measure of kidney function that defines CKD, in 312,468 individuals of diverse ancestry. We identify 127 distinct association signals with homogeneous effects on eGFR across ancestries and enrichment in genomic annotations including kidney-specific histone modifications. Fine-mapping reveals 40 high-confidence variants driving eGFR associations and highlights putative causal genes with cell-type specific expression in glomerulus, and in proximal and distal nephron. Mendelian randomisation supports causal effects of eGFR on overall and cause-specific CKD, kidney stone formation, diastolic blood pressure and hypertension. These results define novel molecular mechanisms and putative causal genes for eGFR, offering insight into clinical outcomes and routes to CKD treatment development.
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| 5. |
- Soranzo, Nicole, et al.
(författare)
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A genome-wide meta-analysis identifies 22 loci associated with eight hematological parameters in the HaemGen consortium
- 2009
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Ingår i: Nature Genetics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1546-1718 .- 1061-4036. ; 41:11, s. 38-1182
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The number and volume of cells in the blood affect a wide range of disorders including cancer and cardiovascular, metabolic, infectious and immune conditions. We consider here the genetic variation in eight clinically relevant hematological parameters, including hemoglobin levels, red and white blood cell counts and platelet counts and volume. We describe common variants within 22 genetic loci reproducibly associated with these hematological parameters in 13,943 samples from six European population-based studies, including 6 associated with red blood cell parameters, 15 associated with platelet parameters and 1 associated with total white blood cell count. We further identified a long-range haplotype at 12q24 associated with coronary artery disease and myocardial infarction in 9,479 cases and 10,527 controls. We show that this haplotype demonstrates extensive disease pleiotropy, as it contains known risk loci for type 1 diabetes, hypertension and celiac disease and has been spread by a selective sweep specific to European and geographically nearby populations.
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