Technology Offers

Reversible adhesion can be used to transfer or to manipulate objects. Especially if the objects are small and/or fragile their manipulation become very challenging. Intermolecular forces such as Van-der-Waals can be used to achieve a strong adhesion between the objects. Moreover, surface functionalization and the creation of nano- and microstructures can be used to improve these adhesion properties. Unfortunately, the adhesion becomes insufficient if the surfaces are wet or rough. Another problems ...

UV-B radiation is a major damaging agent causing damage to plants, tissues and human or animal skin upon exposure. To persist strong UV-B radiation plants produce additional antioxidant sunscreen pigments that belong to the chemical compound family of phenylpropanoids. Since many conventional compounds with sunscreen protection potential do not enter the market due to toxic side effects or they bear the risk to become environmental pollutants when accumulating in natural resources, application ...

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, ...

In contrast to target-based drug discovery, phenotypic screening discloses the effect of a compound on a biological system without revealing its mode of action or its interaction sites. Phenotypic screening has delivered several new valuable drugs, however, the major challenge remains target deconvolution (1). In recent years, “omics” techniques and bioinformatics have brought significant advances to target identification in drug discovery phenotypic screening. However, such analyses can become ...

The study of mechanical properties of materials at high temperatures at the microstructural length scale requires dedicated testing setups. An accurate measurement of the sample temperature is vital for reliable testing. Most of the successful current testing platforms record the temperatures of the sample and tip near the heating sources but not at the respective surface. As a consequence, due to spatial and temporal thermal gradients a reliable surface temperature cannot be measured today. Even ...

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, ...

Anti-IgG secondary antibodies are major tools for the detection or immobilization of primary antibodies in approaches such as western blotting, ELISA, Co-IP and immunofluorescence. Polyclonal anti-IgG secondary antibodies are produced in animals, such as mouse, rabbit, rat, and goat and are directed against the IgG classes of these animals. Thus, the generation of such secondary antibodies requires the keeping and use of a large number of animals, which is not only costly but also a major ethical ...

PC-based software to construct lattice sections and clusters/molecules with extended graphical display and analysis options.

Carbon fixation is arguably the most important biochemical processes on earth, supporting our biosphere by transforming inorganic carbon into organic matter and literally feeding all life forms. The reductive pentose phosphate cycle (rPP, also known as the Calvin–Benson–Bassham Cycle) is responsible for ≥95% of the carbon fixed in the biosphere. Although under a strong selective pressure for eons, this process displays major inefficiencies, some are due to the low catalytic rate and the ...

CellNetAnalyzer is a package for MATLAB and provides a comprehensive and user-friendly environment for structural and functional analysis of biochemical networks. CNA facilitates the analysis of metabolic (stoichiometric) as well as signaling and regulatory networks solely on their network topology, i.e. independent of kinetic mechanisms and parameters. CNA provides a powerful collection of tools and algorithms for structural network analysis which can be started in a menu-controlled ...

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) ...

This novel screwless coupling, which can also be used as overload clutch, offers the possibility without additional tools to connect two rotatable elements even under extremely tight conditions, backlash-free and force fit with high precision. Due to their size, couplings known to date on the market are unsuitable for applications in the field of electronics, optics, metrology and precision engineering. Whereas thanks to the new technology, which was developed at the Max Planck Institute for Solar ...

Lock-in thermography (LIT) is a versatile and very sensitive tool to detect local heat sources in electronic components by 2d-images oft he sample. The DECONV program is a tool for converting these lock-in thermography images into local power density images or simulating LIT images by performing mathematical deconvolution or convolution and uses input image data in ASCII table form. Results are exported as ASCII tables or as bmp-files.

This software is a further development of an older ...

A precise and genetically encoded inhibitor for cell-type selective, inducible and reversible inhibition of protein synthesis

The estimation of excitation lifetimes based on fluorescence or phosphorescence emission is an essential technique in basic and applied science. It provides information on molecular interactions
as well as on physical properties. Measuring the emission lifetime with spatial resolution provides an imaging modality, which in case of fluorescence is called Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging (FLIM). FLIM is applied extensively in biological imaging in order to determine the conformation, activation, ...

This software is based on the paper "Quantitative evaluation of electroluminescence images of solar cells" by O. Breitenstein et al.¹). It allows to load a number of electroluminescence (EL) images to different biases, which have to be given as ASCii tables.

Semiconductor nanowires are of vital importance for many applications, such as flexible electronics, photonics, sensors, and energy harvesting and storage devices. As standard fabrication procedure, vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) growth employs metal catalyst particles (such as gold) as seeds for growth of nanowires. The seeds are deposited on a solid substrate, melted by heating and then exposed to a gas atmosphere containing source materials of the semiconductor. When the metal droplets are supersaturated, ...

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 ...

In mass spectroscopy, many ion sources that transform the specimen to be tested into gas phase ions operate at ambient or elevated pressure. The generated ions have to be transferred into vacuum for further characterization, for instance in a mass analyzer.
The ion transfer into vacuum represents a major bottleneck. Because the pumping power increases rapidly with the size of an opening, long capillaries or small pinholes have to be used. Their transmission is commonly as low as 1%, in optimal ...

An innovative chemical inducer of dimerization for studying protein interactions in cells, that overcomes challenges of available dimerizers.

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

A novel NGS library preparation techniques allowing cheap and reproducible transcriptome analysis of samples with both abundant and rare components, making these techniques very useful in clinical diagnostics as well as biodiversity analysis.

Exploiting the benefits offered by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at ultra-high fields (≥ 7 Tesla) requires optimized radiofrequency (RF) coils. MRI at UHF operates in a regime where the RF wavelength is comparable to the dimensions of the sample size, resulting in an inhomogeneous distribution of the transmit field (B₁⁺) and in an impaired image quality. An array of independent transmit coils arranged in multiple rows provides the degrees of freedom to influence the ...

We offer a new family of cationic ligands, namely N-alkyl/aryl pyridiniophosphines. The ligands can be synthesized through a short, scalable, and highly modular route.

Evaluation of their electronic properties evidenced weak σ-donor and quite strong π-acceptor character when used as ancillary ligands.

File no.: MI-1012-4430-LI-ZE
(liked to MI-1012-5677-LI-ZE describing the generation of human neural microtissues from NECS cells)

A novel precursor population that forms electrophysiologically functional neurons more quickly than protocols starting with hPSCs.

An new approach for treatment of obesity and insulin resistance, that relies on selective ablation of a unique, previously uncharacterized subpopulation of myeloid NK cells.

Biomarkers of ageing have long been sought after to help assess the biological age and general health status of individuals. Considerable efforts have been invested to identify such biomarkers, including physiologic readouts, metabolic parameters, glycomic profiles and others. Nevertheless, markers with strong predictive power have remained elusive.

Work in model organisms has identified several conserved signaling pathways that extend life span, such as reduced insulin/IGF signaling and ...

The Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in collaboration with the Institute of Biotechnology and Drug Research (IBWF) developed novel lignin nanocarriers that can be used for smart pesticide delivery in plants for crop protection. The nanocarriers are characterised by a narrow size distribution and an easy manufacturing, furthermore, they can be loaded with hydrophobic pesticides. Injected to plants, the nanocarriers act as a safe store of pesticide, which is released in situ by lignin degrading ...

Researchers of the Max-Planck-Institute for Colloids and Interfaces and the Paul-Ehrlich-Institute (PEI) have developed a novel codon-specific elongation model (COSEM), that is based on the question how codon bias affects protein expression in combination with a deep understanding of protein synthesis.

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

Mesoporous materials present a large surface-to-volume ratio providing sites for catalysis, molecular separation, adsorption or chemical sensing. Some of the classical mesoporous materials employed include silica, alumina, zirconia, zeolites, and other diverse oxides such Ti or Co, and they are synthetized by routes as self-assembly, sol-gel, spray drying and some variations of these methods known in the state of the art. Additionally, some elements of the platinum group such as Pd, Ru, and their ...

Speckle interferometry is an established metrology technique for the characterization of rough objects. Deformations of rough objects under a load can be determined, as well as – with the help of an additional second wavelength – the surface shape of the object under test. As an illustration, Figure 1 (left) shows the so called raw phase as a result of a deformation measurement on a metal plate. The shape and the density of the fringes indicate the response of the metal plate to the load.
Owing ...

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 ...

SUMOvera enables versatile purification strategies for broad applications in eukaryotic hosts.

An apparatus and method allowing high throughput collection of X-ray diffraction data at room temperature.

The offered thioimidazolium ionic liquids are a class of easily synthesized and harnessed alkylating agents that are completely non-volatile. The active alkylating species is produced in-situ, thus eliminating exposure and the need for specialized equipment. These features can also be used in the solid-state by their attachment to a poly(styrene) support, which allows for easy purification of the product and regeneration of the thioimidazolium alkylator and could be of special interest for flow ...