65 results match your criteria: "University of GroningenGroningen[Affiliation]"

The type and frequency of disturbances experienced by soil microbiomes is expected to increase given predicted global climate change scenarios and intensified anthropogenic pressures on ecosystems. While the direct effect of multiple disturbances to soil microbes has been explored in terms of function, their effect on the recovery of microbial community composition remains unclear. Here, we used soil microcosm experiments and multiple model disturbances to explore their short-term effect on the recovery of soil microbiota after identical or novel stresses.

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Early Transcriptome Response of to Environmental Stresses Reveals Differentially Expressed Small Regulatory RNAs and tRNAs.

Front Microbiol

September 2017

Department of Molecular Genetics, Groningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute, University of GroningenGroningen, Netherlands.

Bacteria can deploy various mechanisms to combat environmental stresses. Many genes have previously been identified in that are involved in sensing the stressors and those that are involved in regulating and mounting a defense against the stressful conditions. However, the expression of small regulatory RNAs (sRNAs) during industrially relevant stress conditions has not been assessed yet in , while sRNAs have been shown to be involved in many stress responses in other bacteria.

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Surface properties of bacteria are determined by the molecular composition of the cell wall and they are important for interactions of cells with their environment. Well-known examples of bacterial interactions with surfaces are biofilm formation and the fermentation of solid materials like food and feed. is broadly used for the fermentation of cheese and buttermilk and it is primarily isolated from either plant material or the dairy environment.

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Aminoglycoside antibiotics are widely used for the treatment of life-threatening bacterial infections, but cause permanent hearing loss in a substantial proportion of treated patients. The sensory hair cells of the inner ear are damaged following entry of these antibiotics via the mechano-electrical transducer (MET) channels located at the tips of the hair cell's stereocilia. d-Tubocurarine (dTC) is a MET channel blocker that reduces the loading of gentamicin-Texas Red (GTTR) into rat cochlear hair cells and protects them from gentamicin treatment.

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We examine the relationships among employees' use of energy management strategies and two occupational well-being outcomes: job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. Based on conservation of resources theory, it was hypothesized that employees with high job demands would benefit more from using energy management strategies (i.e.

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"I Want, Therefore I Am" - Anticipated Upward Mobility Reduces Ingroup Concern.

Front Psychol

August 2017

Social Psychology, Section of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of GenevaGeneva, Switzerland.

Empirical findings suggest that members of socially disadvantaged groups who join a better-valued group through individual achievement tend to express low concern for their disadvantaged ingroup (e.g., denial of collective discrimination, low intent to initiate collective action).

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Plant root secreted compounds alter the gene expression of associated microorganisms by acting as signal molecules that either stimulate or repel the interaction with beneficial or harmful species, respectively. However, it is still unclear whether two distinct groups of beneficial bacteria, non-plant-associated (soil) strains and plant-associated (endophytic) strains, respond uniformly or variably to the exposure with root exudates. Therefore, , a potential biocontrol agent and plant growth-promoting bacterium, was isolated from the endosphere of potatoes and from soil of the same geographical region.

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Building on recent psychological research showing that power increases self-focused attention, we propose that having power increases accuracy in perception of bodily signals, a phenomenon known as interoceptive accuracy. Consistent with our proposition, participants in a high-power experimental condition outperformed those in the control and low-power conditions in the Schandry heartbeat-detection task. We demonstrate that the effect of power on interoceptive accuracy is not explained by participants' physiological arousal, affective state, or general intention for accuracy.

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The neurotransmitter serotonin (5-HT) plays a vital regulatory role in both the brain and gut. 5-HT is crucial for regulating mood in the brain as well as gastrointestinal motility and secretion peripherally. Alterations in 5-HT transmission have been linked to pathological symptoms in both intestinal and psychiatric disorders and selective 5-HT transporter (5-HTT) inhibitors, affecting the 5-HT system by blocking the 5-HT transporter (5-HTT) have been successfully used to treat CNS- and intestinal disorders.

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MinC Oscillates from Pole to Pole to Ensure Proper Cell Division and Shape.

Front Microbiol

July 2017

Department of Molecular Microbiology, Groningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute, University of GroningenGroningen, Netherlands.

(Xac) is the causal agent of citrus canker, a disease that affects citrus crops and causes economic impact worldwide. To further characterize cell division in this plant pathogen, we investigated the role of the protein MinC in cell division, chromosome segregation, and peptidoglycan incorporation by deleting the gene using allele exchange. Xac with deleted exhibited the classic Δ phenotype observed in other bacteria deleted for components: minicells and short filamentation.

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The α-Acetolactate Synthase ALS Confers Resistance to Nitrosative Stress.

Front Microbiol

July 2017

Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica NOVA, Universidade Nova de LisboaOeiras, Portugal.

is a worldwide pathogen that colonizes the human nasal cavity and is a major cause of respiratory and cutaneous infections. In the nasal cavity, thrives with high concentrations of nitric oxide (NO) produced by the innate immune effectors and has available for growth slow-metabolizing free hexoses, such as galactose. Here, we have used deep sequencing transcriptomic analysis (RNA-Seq) and H-NMR to uncover how grown on galactose, a major carbon source present in the nasopharynx, survives the deleterious action of NO.

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Aldo van Eyck's Playgrounds: Aesthetics, Affordances, and Creativity.

Front Psychol

July 2017

Center for Human Movement Sciences, University Medical Center Groningen, University of GroningenGroningen, Netherlands.

After World War II, the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck developed hundreds of playgrounds in the city of Amsterdam. These public playgrounds were located in parks, squares, and derelict sites, and consisted of minimalistic aesthetic play equipment that was supposed to stimulate the creativity of children. Over the last decades, these playgrounds have been studied by sociologists, theorists of art and architecture, and psychologists.

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Based on an integration of job design and lifespan developmental theories, Truxillo et al. (2012) proposed that job characteristics interact with employee age in predicting important work outcomes. Using an experimental policy-capturing design, we investigated age-differential effects of four core job characteristics (i.

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Across four studies, we examine multiple identities in the context of gender and propose that women's attitudes toward gender group membership are governed by two largely orthogonal dimensions of gender identity: identification with women and identification with feminists. We argue that identification with women reflects attitudes toward the society gives to group membership: what does it mean to be a woman in terms of group characteristics, interests and values? Identification with feminists, on the other hand, is a politicized identity dimension reflecting attitudes toward the social position of the group: what does it mean to be a woman in terms of disadvantage, inequality, and relative status? We examine the utility of this multiple identity approach in four studies. Study 1 showed that identification with women reflects attitudes toward group characteristics, such as femininity and self-stereotyping, while identification with feminists reflects attitudes toward the group's social position, such as perceived sexism.

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Increased White Matter Inflammation in Aging- and Alzheimer's Disease Brain.

Front Mol Neurosci

June 2017

Department of Neuroscience, Section Medical Physiology, University Medical Center Groningen, University of GroningenGroningen, Netherlands.

Chronic neuroinflammation, which is primarily mediated by microglia, plays an essential role in aging and neurodegeneration. It is still unclear whether this microglia-induced neuroinflammation occurs globally or is confined to distinct brain regions. In this study, we investigated microglia activity in various brain regions upon healthy aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD)-related pathology in both human and mouse samples.

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The modern era of globalization has been accompanied by a massive growth in interconnections between groups, and has led to the sharing of multiple identities by individuals and groups. Following these developments, research has focused on the issue of multiple identities, and has shed important light on how who hold these complex forms of identity feel and behave, and on the reactions they elicit from members of other groups. However, the potential of with such multiple identities (e.

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Illuminating Messengers: An Update and Outlook on RNA Visualization in Bacteria.

Front Microbiol

June 2017

Department of Molecular Genetics, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of GroningenGroningen, Netherlands.

To be able to visualize the abundance and spatiotemporal features of RNAs in bacterial cells would permit obtaining a pivotal understanding of many mechanisms underlying bacterial cell biology. The first methods that allowed observing single mRNA molecules in individual cells were introduced by Bertrand et al. (1998) and Femino et al.

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Multiple Group Membership and Well-Being: Is There Always Strength in Numbers?

Front Psychol

June 2017

Social, Environmental and Organisational Research Group, Department of Psychology, University of ExeterExeter, United Kingdom.

A growing body of research points to the value of multiple group memberships for individual well-being. However, much of this work considers group memberships very broadly and in terms of number alone. We conducted two correlational studies exploring how the relationship between multiple group membership and well-being is shaped by (a) the complexity of those groups within the overall self-concept (i.

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Deciphering Physiological Functions of AHL Quorum Quenching Acylases.

Front Microbiol

June 2017

Chemical and Pharmaceutical Biology Department, University of GroningenGroningen, Netherlands.

-Acylhomoserine lactone (AHL)-acylase (also known as amidase or amidohydrolase) is a class of enzyme that belongs to the Ntn-hydrolase superfamily. As the name implies, AHL-acylases are capable of hydrolysing AHLs, the most studied signaling molecules for quorum sensing in Gram-negative bacteria. Enzymatic degradation of AHLs can be beneficial in attenuating bacterial virulence, which can be exploited as a novel approach to fight infection of human pathogens, phytopathogens or aquaculture-related contaminations.

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Article Synopsis
  • 3-Hydroxybenzoate 6-hydroxylase (3HB6H) is an enzyme found in soil microorganisms that helps break down aromatic compounds and is notable for containing a phospholipid cofactor.
  • Recent purification of 3HB6H from a specific host (RHA#2) showed it has similar properties to previously studied versions, but with a different phospholipid, phosphatidylinositol, reflecting its actinomycete origin.
  • Analytical techniques indicated that the presence of phospholipids enhances the enzyme's stability and suggests that different bacterial hosts influence the types of lipids that 3HB6H can bind.
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The main goal of this paper was to disentangle encoding and retrieval interference effects in anaphor processing and thus to evaluate the hypothesis predicting that structurally inaccessible nouns (distractors) are not considered to be potential anaphor antecedents during language processing (Nicol and Swinney, 1989). Three self-paced reading experiments were conducted: one in German, comparing gender-unmarked reflexives and gender-marked pronouns, and two in Russian, comparing gender-marked and -unmarked reflexives. In the German experiment, no interference effects were found.

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