The soil bacterium and plant pathogen <i>Agrobacterium tumefaciens</i> has the ability to transfer a defined part of its genome, the so called transferred DNA (T-DNA), to plant cells. This transfer has been successfully ...

In den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten hat sich rund um Übergangsmetallkomplexe, die eine Dreifachbindung zu einem der schweren Homologen des Kohlenstoffs (Si–Pb) enthalten, ein neues Forschungsgebiet an der Grenzfläche zwischen ...

Eines der Hauptthemengebiete der Arbeitsgruppe Lützen ist die metallosupramolekulare Chemie. Hierbei geht es vor allem um die Selbstorganisation und in (chiralen) Mehrkomponentensystemen um die Selbsterkennung beziehungsweise ...

Massive stars, i.e. stars more massive than about ten times that of the Sun, are key agents in the Universe. They synthesise many of the chemical elements that are so important for life on Earth, helped reionising the early ...

Pulsars are rapidly-rotating, highly-magnetised neutron stars that produce radio emission in their magnetospheres, which is detected as pulses on Earth. The focus of this thesis is observing pulsars as the means to study ...

Degradation of rock permafrost can cause instability due to influences on rock- and ice-mechanical properties. Permafrost conditions can be altered by thermal processes and, thus, also mechanical properties of rocks. Snow ...

Elucidating the precise function of individual protein kinases within complex signal transduction cascades represents one of the greatest challenges in molecular biology. Protein kinases are enzymes that catalyze the ...

In the Western Alps of Switzerland and Italy, a stack of oceanic and continental units assembled during Late Cretaceous – Paleogene Alpine subduction, exhumation, and accretion. In the study area in the southern Valais and ...

Schizophrenia is a highly heritable, multifactorial mental disorder. Up to date, a number of common SNPs with low penetrance and large rare structural variants (CNVs) with higher penetrance have been identified to contribute to schizophrenia susceptibility. The risk variants identified so far explain only part of the observed heritability, suggesting that many susceptibility variants, both common and rare, still await identification. Aim of the present doctoral thesis was to contribute to the understanding of the genetic basis of schizophrenia by identifying more of these unknown susceptibility variants, in particular rare and low-frequency variants. To reach this aim, three genetic loci which had previously been identified through either genome-wide association studies (GWASs) or CNV studies were resequenced with the underlying rationale that different types of genetic variations can contribute to disease susceptibility at an individual locus. Among the three regions studied were two regions that had emerged from CNV studies, the NRXN1 gene and the 1q21.1 microdeletion region, and one region that had emerged from GWASs, the TCF4 gene. In all of the three regions, discovery samples comprised of about 190 individuals and follow-up samples ranging from about 2500 to 9000 individuals were used. Discovery samples were resequenced for the region of interest to discover rare and low-frequency variants and follow-up samples were used for genotyping of the identified variants. Various statistical tests were performed to test for the association of rare and low-frequency variants in each of these regions with schizophrenia. Complementary analyses like expression and splice site analyses were performed when applicable....

Our understanding on the formation, mechanism and timing of the formation of the Earth’s earliest continents hinges on obtaining robust and accurate ages of melt depletion and lithosphere stabilisation. The Re-Os geochronometer ...