Biology subjects

König, S.

Publications and source records attributed to König, S..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

Stable isotope analysis (δ13C, δ15N, δ34S) reveal divers manuring practices of rye (Secale cereale) in northern Europe since 1500 years

First analysis of stable isotopes in rye from northern and eastern Germany provides insights into the early history of rye cultivation from the migration to the late medieval period. A comparison of the{delta} 15N with modern experiments reveals that already the early cultivation involved the practice of intensive manuring. The intensity of manuring does not demonstrate a discernible trend over time but high variability. In some instances, it is likely that rye was cultivated as part of a rotation cultivation system including manuring. Through its{delta} 34S values some rye turned out to be manured with marine peats. Rye, reputed to be a frugal crop, was cultivated on poor sandy soils to a limited extent only. Statistically significant correlation between the 13C content and yields demonstrates that the highest yield success on dwelling mounds was achieved, while the majority of fields on dry sandy soils yielded in relation only 40 to 70 %. Manured rye facilitated the emergence of multi-headed village communities and towns and stabilized the political power systems. The cultivation on mounds flooded by winter storm surges emphasises that summer rye was initially cultivated, before winter-rye became the dominating crop in Germany until the mid-20th century.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

Phosphorylation-dependent interactions of VAPB and ELYS contribute to the temporal progression of mitosis

ELYS is a nucleoporin that localizes to the nuclear side of the nuclear envelope in interphase cells. In mitosis, it serves as an assembly platform that interacts with chromatin and then with nucleoporin subcomplexes to initiate the formation of novel nuclear pore complexes. Here we describe the interaction of ELYS with the membrane protein VAPB. In mitosis, ELYS becomes phosphorylated at many sites, including a predicted FFAT (two phenylalanines in an acidic tract) motif, which is shown to mediate interaction with the MSP (major sperm protein)-domain of VAPB. Phosphorylation-dependent binding of VAPB to ELYS is demonstrated by peptide binding assays and co-immunoprecipitation experiments. In anaphase, the two proteins co-localize to the non-core region of the newly forming nuclear envelope. Depletion of VAPB resulted in prolonged mitosis and slow progression from meta-to anaphase and also to chromosome segregation defects. Together, our results suggest an active role of VAPB in recruiting membrane fragments to chromatin and in the biogenesis of a novel nuclear envelope during mitosis.

cell biology↗

bioRxiv2021

De Novo Prediction of RNA 3D Structures with Deep Learning

We present a Deep Learning approach to predict 3D folding structures of RNAs from their nucleic acid sequence. Our approach combines an autoregressive Deep Generative Model, Monte Carlo Tree Search, and a Score Model to find and rank the most likely folding structures for a given RNA sequence. We confirm the predictive power of our approach by setting new benchmarks for some longer sequences in a simulated blind test of the RNA Puzzles prediction challenge.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2017

Entorhinal cortex receptive fields are modulated by spatial attention, even without movement.

Grid cells have been identified in the entorhinal cortex in a variety of species and allow for the precise decoding of position in space (1-7). Along with potentially playing an important role in navigation, grid cells have recently been hypothesized to make a general contribution to mental operations, including remembering the past and thinking about the future (8,9). A prerequisite for this hypothesis is that grid cell activity does not critically depend on physical movement. Directed attention, which contributes to virtually all mental operations and can be separated from physical movement provides a good test case to investigate this hypothesis. Overt attention in the form of fixational eye movements leads to grid-like firing fields in the monkey entorhinal cortex (3). Here we show that movement of covert attention, without any physical movement, also elicits spatial receptive fields with a triangular tiling of the space. In monkeys trained to maintain central fixation while covertly attending to a stimulus moving in the periphery we identified a significant population (20/141, 14% neurons at a FDR<5%) of entorhinal cells with spatially structured receptive fields. Further, we were able to identify a population of neurons that were labeled as grid cells on an individual basis. This contrast with our recordings obtained in the hippocampus, where grid-like representations were not observed. Our results provide compelling evidence that neurons in macaque entorhinal cortex do not rely on physical movement. Notably, these results support the notion that grid cells may be capable of serving a variety of different cognitive functions and suggest that grid cells are a versatile component of many neural algorithms.

neuroscience↗