Technology Offers

File no.: MI-1012-5677-LI-ZE
(liked to MI-1012-4430-LI-ZE describing the generation of neuro- epithelial stem cells as precursors for microtissue generation)

A robust method for producing and analyzing highly homogenous human neural organoids.

Recently, many efforts have been made to improve growth and yield of crop plants. CO₂ fixation in plants is primarily catalyzed by the enzyme ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase (Rubisco). The inherent inefficiency of Rubisco necessitates an additional metabolic process termed photorespiration, which results in the loss of carbon and energy. In fact, it has been estimated that plants lose approximately 25% of the fixed carbon due to photorespiration. Despite several attempts to improve ...

With approximately 600,000 deaths annually colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common cancer types worldwide. Early cancer and pre-cancer (polyps) detection by colonoscopy over the age of 50 until now is the best strategy for disease control and the chance of the cancer to be curable. Epigenetic changes such as DNA methylation has been shown to occur already at early stages of tumor development making such differentially methylated regions (DMRs) highly attractive for biomarker development ...

Cancer remains a major health burden and is the second leading cause of death globally (WHO). The microenvironment of cancer cells plays an important role in disease progression. In particular, the composition of the extracellular matrix regulates angiogenesis, cell proliferation, differentiation, cell survival and apoptosis. Dysregulation and accumulation of the extracellular matrix promotes cellular transformation and metastasis leading to cancer progression. A better understanding of the role ...

Human influenza A virus (IAV) is responsible for seasonal disease in people and can cause worldwide pandemics. The main lines of defense against IAV are vaccines and antiviral drugs.

Influenza vaccines, including killed and live vaccines, recombinant virus-like particles and viral particles, have been available commercially for many years. Typically, the composition of influenza vaccines is based on the major influenza virus strains causing infection in the previous season. Accordingly, ...

For sieving and separation purposes porous materials with adjustable sizes and shapes of the pores as well as tunable mechanical properties are required. The existing materials such as sintered materials, open-cell foams or cemented aggregates can be made porous but they are either fragile or can collapse for large deformation. Therefore, chemically inert and damage resistant porous materials with adjustable permeability as well as mechanical and geometrical properties that can sustain large deformation ...

This invention includes two alternative advanced methods to achieve a homogenous collector power distribution, which improves the collector capability of high power vacuum-tubes by a factor of two as compared to conventional methods. Furthermore the applied method has a high flexibility to vary the power distribution over a wide range of profiles and match the deposition profiles to different designs of collectors in existing or future electron tubes.

The dynamics of complex flows and turbulences are dominated by vortices of many different scales. In general, the vortex describes the group motion of fluid elements in a circular fashion, whereas the vorticity quantizes this spinning moment of a fluid element confined to a small neighborhood.

For diagnosis of flows, conventional techniques track the movements of small particles added into the flow (e.g., Lagrangian particle tracking, LPT, and particle image velocimetry, PIV). However, ...

Anthrax is an acute infectious disease caused by the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus anthracis. B.anthracis can cause human disease via the gastrointestinal, cutaneous or inhalational routes. There is still a considerably high rate of mortality from inhalational anthrax of up to 75 percent, even though fluorquinolone class antibiotics (e.g., ciprofloxacin) are being administered as a first-line therapy. This strategy, in addition, is being threatened by the spread of plasmid-mediated ...

Ultrasound is being used in many fields ranging from medical imaging and therapy to non-destructive testing, contact-free particle handling or spatially selective heating in industrial settings. Often, those applications require shaping (including focusing) of an ultrasonic field. Compared to existing transducers with fixed lenses or phased array transducers (PATs) the present invention allows much more sophisticated sound fields to be generated using much simpler and cheaper technology.

Since 2000 bioinspired fibrillar dry adhesives have been studied intensively culminating in commercial products already available on the market. Currently known fibrillar adhesives are fully wetted by oils, leading to significantly decreased adhesion and friction performance. Therefore, a high demand exists for reversible dry fibrillar adhesives that can repel oil-like liquids and adhere strongly to surfaces wetted by them.

To meet the aforementioned challenges, an extraordinary fibrillar ...

Prof. Klaus Müllen an co-workers at the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research developed a straightforward C-H borylation at the 2- and 2,7-positions of pyrene derivatives. The small neutral organic molecules show sharp fluorescence emission peeks between 400-550 nm and high photoluminiscense quantum yields.

Fluorescent dyes are widely used as indispensable markers in biology, optical microscopy, and analytical chemistry. The availability and the proper choice of the dye is a key factor to success of the entire labelling and imaging procedure. Due to superior brightness and photostability, synthetic dyes often represent an attractive alternative to fluorescent proteins.

Among the multitude of fluorophores reported so far, only rhodamines, carbopyronines, and silicon-rhodamines bearing a carboxyl ...

Evaporation cells for thin film deposition often operate under ultrahigh vacuum or special gas atmosphere, requiring long growth campaigns and short maintenance openings to preserve the best possible vacuum environment. The deposition leads to coating of the inner chamber walls, the removal of which is difficult and very time consuming. Growth control and interruptions during material deposition may require frequent operation of the closure device or shutter. The commonly used shutter (Fig. 1) ...

Prof. Kai Sundmacher and co-workers at the MPI for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems developed a novel core-shell catalyst design with a highly active catalyst core surrounded by an inert, low-permeability shell. The new catalyst design leads to an intrinsic heat management that avoids hotspots in strongly exothermic reactions. This allows faster reactor start-up and shut-down and makes the catalysts suitable for rapid load changes in discontinuous processes.

Prof. Klaus-Richard Pörschke and co-workers from the MPI for Coal Research developed a highly hydrophobic perfluoroaryl borate (FAB) ligand for trapping the radioative 134/137 Cs isotopes with 100% specificity. The novel approach could improve the decontamination of humans compared to the administration of so called insouble Prussian blue currently in use.

Light microscopy enables fascinating insights into the microcosm of life. It is one of the key techniques in life science and provides access to a better understanding of biology across many orders of magnitude in time and space. The use of visible light allows for minimally invasive imaging - even of living cells - and direct observation with the human eye. However, the use of visible light limits the resolution of the image obtained to about half the wavelength of the used light. The limiting ...

Engineering light distributions in a three-dimensional volume to achieve selective illumination profiles is an instrumental task shared by many optical and microscopy techniques. The optimization of the light distribution can lead to significant enhancement of relevant performance figures and ultimately to the extension of the instrument or experimental protocol capabilities^1,2,3,4,5. Targeted illumination profiles can be used either to mechanically interact with molecules at nanometer ...

Resistance induced heating of electrical wiring during operation is one of the limiting factors to design high-power electromagnetic coils. The commonly used approach to eliminate the heating of electrical wires is to introduce a hollow conductive copper wire into electrical wiring and to cool this wire with water. Unfortunately, this approach is not applicable for high power density electromagnetic coil as well as for coils with small dimensions. Another approach to enhance the cooling properties ...

An Enhancement Cavity (EC) with at least one toroidal and/or cylindrical mirror is described. This allows for an arbitrary beam ellipticity of the eigenmode. In particular at a stability edge, where the ellipticity diverges with purely spherical optics, a round beam can be obtained.

Prof. Klaus-Richard Pörschke and co-workers at the MPI for Coal Research developed a novel cyclic process for the quantitative extraction of cesium with 100% selectivity from any given aqueous or acidic solution, irrespective of the other components.

Fusion Tags Comprising Ubiquitin-like Modifiers and Corresponding Proteases For Protein Purification From Selected Eukaryotic Expression Hosts

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is nowadays a leading mo¬dality for diagnostic imaging with about 100 million examinations per year worldwide. However, when invented by Paul Christian Lauterbur in 1973, MRI was too slow to allow for routine medical applications. A breakthrough was achieved in 1985 by the FLASH (Fast Low Angle Shot) technique developed by Jens Frahm and his team at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. With FLASH the measuring time for a cross-sectional ...

We offer a new simple and low cost technology to fabricate graphene-encapsulated metal or metal compound nanoparticles. The resulting hybrid nanoparticles are protected by granted substance claims in US, CN, TW and EP (DE, FR, GB, BE). Currently the patent protected graphene coated nano particles are discussed as high performance electrode materials in the lithium ion battery business (for example Samsung's "Graphene Balls").

The CRISPR-Cas system is a powerful tool for site-specific genome editing. It allows for the inactivation or substitution of entire genes. However, most hereditary diseases in humans are caused by single point mutations, the correction of which requires only subtle changes to the DNA. Recently, base editors (BEs) were developed that allow the introduction of selective nucleotide substitutions. A Cas9 enzyme is fused to a nucleobase deaminase catalysing C-to-T mutations (by C-to-U deamination) ...

Ultrafast amplifier systems providing high average powers (>10W) at repetition rates in the kHz regime suffer from severe accumulation of nonlinear phase inside the laser gain medium and other optical components within the amplifier. Implementation of chirped pulse amplification (CPA) constitutes a well-established method to reduce the peak intensity of the laser pulse during the amplification process [1, 2]. However, state of the art laser materials supporting high average output powers such ...

Screening the level of specific blumenols in plant leaves allows simple implementation in marker assisted breeding and high-throughput analysis.

The efficiency of solar cells is strongly affected by local inhomogeneities. Especially inhomogeneities of the dark-current voltage (I-V) characteristic are of interest: The local dark current-voltage characteristic is a measure for the local recombination properties of the solar cell. Lock-in thermography performed in the dark (DLIT) can be used to detect and evaluate locally increased dark current densities.

The invention relates to a monolithic optical frequency comb generator. Furthermore, the invention relates to a method of generating an optical frequency comb.

Biological fixation of CO₂ is an important process carried out by plants and several microorganisms, which can be harnessed for sustainable, biobased production of fuels and chemicals. Particularly, the fixation of CO₂ by autotrophic microorganisms such as cyanobacteria and microalgae can be employed for converting CO₂ into value-added products, such as commodity chemicals or fuels. However, the sustainable autotrophic production ...

A tRNA^ALA heteroplasmy mouse model to study mitochondrial disorders such as encephalomyophathies, that recapitulates symptoms as observed in human patients with disease-causing mutation in the same mitochondrial gene.

An efficient system to monitor and control animal behavior in wildlife as well as in laboratory settings

A group of scientists at the MPI for Polymer Research in Mainz developed nano-graphene structures that can be used as a new class of fluorophores for super-resolution microscopy (SMLM and STED).

They perform like hybrids of organic dyes and QDs: they have excellent environment-independent blinking properties, emit high photon numbers, display high photo-stability, possess low toxicity, have a molecular size below 2 nm, and have narrow excitation and emission spectra.

These nanographene ...

A promising target to develop treatment options for osteoporosis and other disease conditions associated with bone loss

Antiviral therapy against retroviruses and alphaviruses using tRNA^Leu(UUA) overexpression

Synthetic Glycosylphosphatidylinositols (GPIs) with high selectivity and purity for Toxoplasmosis diagnosis and vaccine.

Carbohydrates form one of the major classes of biological macromolecules in living organisms, but structural analysis and the quality control of carbohydrate structures represent a major challenge due to the frequent occurrence of isomers that are difficult to distinguish using established techniques.

Changes in protein glycosylation are frequently identified in the context of diseases. For example, alterations in N-glycan profiles from blood plasma have been found to correlate with pathological ...

For the evaluation of crystallisation processes, process parameters like temperature and concentration can be easily measured. However, to measure the crystal size distribution continuously is a challenging task.
Different methods relaying on back scattering or reflection of monochromatic light can be applied that yield chord-length distributions, which often deviate from the actual crystal or particle size distribution. For analysing the true crystal dimensions and, additionally, the crystal ...

Scientists in the group of Atmospheric Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz have developed a novel thiosulfate based ozone scrubber to ensure accurate measurements of trace analytes. It is known from the literature that commercial potassium iodide (KI) containing ozone scrubbers can cause errors in the measurement of carbonyl compounds such as aldehydes and ketones due to byproducts formed from the oxidation of KI. Commercial ozone scrubbers based on sodium thiosulfate ...

Playful is a scripting language for orchestration of Python modules. Playful allows developers to both organize the logic of activation in reactive behaviour tree and setup sensory-motor couplings, making it especially useful for robotics

A computer-implemented method that allows calculating concentration ranges of components within complex networks of biochemical reactions.

X-ray Detector Software for processing single-crystal monochromatic diffraction data recorded by the rotation method.

The invention describes an easy and cheap to produce, compact coupling part, manufactured out of one workpiece. This part, scalable for shaft diameters as low as 1 mm upwards, enables a quick and secure, backlash-free one- or two-sided engagement of shafts without the need for working space or additional tools (like a screwdriver). If requested, torque limited coupling (in one or both rotation directions) is possible. The production methods comprise a variety of materials and manufacturing processes. ...

SIMNRA is a Microsoft Windows program for the simulation of energy spectra for ion beam analysis with incident ions from about 100 keV to many MeV. SIMNRA can be used for the simulation of Rutherford backscattering (RBS), elastic backscattering with non-Rutherford cross-sections (EBS), nuclear reaction analysis (NRA), elastic recoil detection analysis (ERDA), and medium energy ion scattering (MEIS). Almost 3000 different non-Rutherford and nuclear reactions cross-sections for incident protons, ...

Im Zuge der stetigen Weiterentwicklung und Nachfrage auf dem Gebiet der minimal invasiven Chirugie wurde am Max-Planck-Institut für intelligente Systeme in Stuttgart im Team von Herrn Prof Sitti für patientenfreundliche Magen-Darm-Untersuchungen ein kabelloses kapselförmiges Endoskop in Pillengröße, das sogenannte "B-MASCE" entwickelt. Die aus einem Elastomer bestehende Kapsel dient hierbei sowohl als Gehäuse als auch als Federelement für die Nadel. Über in der Kapsel eingebaute Magnete ...

The ability of hypervalent iodine compounds to act as electrophilic group-transfer reagents has been extensively exploited during the last several years in a variety of synthetically useful transformations
like cyanations and alkynylations. Now it was found, that novel imidazolium sulfuranes, which are isolobal to I(III) species and also depict the key threecenter four-electron bond motive, can be used as an alternative platform for the development of new electrophilic group-transfer reagents.

Imidazolium ...

Novel gas exchange membranes based on superamphiphobic coatings applied on metal meshes were created and tested in different applications, like gas scrubbing and blood oxygenation.
By using the novel membrans drawbacks of traditional membranes - like insufficient wetting, plugging and depositions chemical incompatibility and temperature instability - can be avoided.

Proteins are the main functional units within cells. Their regulated synthesis and degradation are crucial for controlling biological processes. In all cells, protein synthesis is used to respond to extra- and/or intracellular cues to remodel cellular function. Previous studies probing the role of protein synthesis have used chemical inhibitors, often common antibiotics, which are effective but lack functional and cell-type specificity when applied to a mixture of cells.

DISLIN is a high level library of subroutines and functions that display data graphically. It is intended to be a powerful and easy to use software package for programmers and scientists that does not require knowledge of hardware features. The software is available for the programming languages C/C++, Fortran 77 and Fortran 90/95. For some operating systems, the languages Perl, Python, Java, Ruby, TCL and the C/C++ interpreter Ch are also supported.

DISLIN can display graphic information ...

Pulsed laser deposition (PLD) facilitates efficient production of thin films using a laser ablation technique. Targets are selected according to the coating desired. Multiple targets are either moved mechanically to the incidence area, or they are fixed so that the laser beam is alternatively focused on each of them. Multiple targets are, however, known to cause discontinuities, whereas single multicomponent target usually doesn’t ensure compositional homogeneity. The technology presented here ...