Effects of short- and long-term variations in RLS severity on perceived health status - the COR-study.

In a cohort study among 2751 members (71.5% females) of the German and Swiss RLS patient organizations changes in restless legs syndrome (RLS) severity over time was assessed and the impact on quality of life, sleep quality and depressive symptoms was analysed. A standard set of scales (RLS severity scale IRLS, SF-36, Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index and the Centre for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale) in mailed questionnaires was repeatedly used to assess RLS severity and health status over time and a 7-day diary once to assess short-term variations. A clinically relevant change of the RLS severity was defined by a change of at least 5 points on the IRLS scale. During 36 months follow-up minimal improvement of RLS severity between assessments was observed. Men consistently reported higher severity scores. RLS severity increased with age reaching a plateau in the age group 45-54 years. During 3 years 60.2% of the participants had no relevant (±5 points) change in RLS severity. RLS worsening was significantly related to an increase in depressive symptoms and a decrease in sleep quality and quality of life. The short-term variation showed distinctive circadian patterns with rhythm magnitudes strongly related to RLS severity. The majority of participants had a stable course of severe RLS over three years. An increase in RLS severity was accompanied by a small to moderate negative, a decrease by a small positive influence on quality of life, depressive symptoms and sleep quality.

Service level agreements-driven management of distributed applications in cloud computing environments

Advancements in cloud computing have enabled the proliferation of distributed applications, which require management and control of multiple services. However, without an efficient mechanism for scaling services in response to changing workload conditions, such as number of connected users, application performance might suffer, leading to violations of Service Level Agreements (SLA) and possible inefficient use of hardware resources. Combining dynamic application requirements with the increased use of virtualised computing resources creates a challenging resource Management context for application and cloud-infrastructure owners. In such complex environments, business entities use SLAs as a means for specifying quantitative and qualitative requirements of services. There are several challenges in running distributed enterprise applications in cloud environments, ranging from the instantiation of service VMs in the correct order using an adequate quantity of computing resources, to adapting the number of running services in response to varying external loads, such as number of users. The application owner is interested in finding the optimum amount of computing and network resources to use for ensuring that the performance requirements of all her/his applications are met. She/he is also interested in appropriately scaling the distributed services so that application performance guarantees are maintained even under dynamic workload conditions. Similarly, the infrastructure Providers are interested in optimally provisioning the virtual resources onto the available physical infrastructure so that her/his operational costs are minimized, while maximizing the performance of tenants’ applications. Motivated by the complexities associated with the management and scaling of distributed applications, while satisfying multiple objectives (related to both consumers and providers of cloud resources), this thesis proposes a cloud resource management platform able to dynamically provision and coordinate the various lifecycle actions on both virtual and physical cloud resources using semantically enriched SLAs. The system focuses on dynamic sizing (scaling) of virtual infrastructures composed of virtual machines (VM) bounded application services. We describe several algorithms for adapting the number of VMs allocated to the distributed application in response to changing workload conditions, based on SLA-defined performance guarantees. We also present a framework for dynamic composition of scaling rules for distributed service, which used benchmark-generated application Monitoring traces. We show how these scaling rules can be combined and included into semantic SLAs for controlling allocation of services. We also provide a detailed description of the multi-objective infrastructure resource allocation problem and various approaches to satisfying this problem. We present a resource management system based on a genetic algorithm, which performs allocation of virtual resources, while considering the optimization of multiple criteria. We prove that our approach significantly outperforms reactive VM-scaling algorithms as well as heuristic-based VM-allocation approaches.

Quantitative PCR for the diagnosis of cutaneous leishmaniasis from formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded skin sections.

The present report describes a real-time PCR-based procedure to reliably determine the quantity of Leishmania amastigotes in relation to the amount of host tissue in histological skin sections from canine and equine cases of cutaneous leishmaniasis. The novel diagnostic Leishmania-PCR has a detection limit of <0.02 amastigotes per μg tissue, which corresponds well to the detection limit of immunohistochemistry and is far beyond that of conventional histology. Our results emphasise the importance of PCR to complement routine histology of cutaneous leishmaniasis cases, particularly in laboratories in which no immunohistochemical assay is available.

Plant genotype affects the quality of oilseed rape (Brassica napus) for adults and larvae of the pollen beetle (Meligethes aeneus)

Plant quality is one of the main factors influencing the fitness of phytophagous insects. Plant quality can vary not only among genotypes of the same host plant species, but also relative to the insect sex or its life stage. In the present study, the performance of larvae and adults of the pollen beetle (Meligethes aeneus F., Coleoptera: Nitidulidae), a major insect pest of oilseed rape crops, is compared on six genotypes of oilseed rape (Brassica napus). All of the traits that are measured vary among genotypes, and comprise larval developmental duration, life span of unfed emerging adults and survival time of field-sampled adults fed with pollen from the different genotypes. No correlation is found between insect performance and quantity of food available, showing that the quality of the food (i.e. pollen) is the fitness determinant for this insect species. Additionally, the performance of larvae and adults is also not correlated despite use of the same plant genotypes, suggesting that the determinants of pollen quality differ at least partially between both life stages. It is hypothesized that this may be a result of extensive differences in diet breadth between the life stages: larvae are specialists of brassicaceous plants, whereas adults are generalists. Finally, it is suggested that the manipulation of plant quality to increase pollen beetle development time may comprise a valuable strategy for favouring biological control by natural enemies of this pest; for example, as a result of extending the vulnerability window of larvae to attack by parasitoids.

Hit-and-run trophallaxis of small hive beetles

Some parasites of social insects are able to exploit the exchange of food between nestmates via trophallaxis, because they are chemically disguised as nestmates. However, a few parasites succeed in trophallactic solicitation although they are attacked by workers. The underlying mechanisms are not well understood. The small hive beetle (=SHB), Aethina tumida, is such a parasite of honey bee, Apis mellifera, colonies and is able to induce trophallaxis. Here, we investigate whether SHB trophallactic solicitation is innate and affected by sex and experience. We quantified characteristics of the trophallactic solicitation in SHBs from laboratory-reared individuals that were either bee-naïve or had 5 days experience. The data clearly show that SHB trophallactic solicitation is innate and further suggest that it can be influenced by both experience and sex. Inexperienced SHB males begged more often than any of the other groups had longer breaks than their experienced counterparts and a longer soliciting duration than both experienced SHB males and females, suggesting that they start rather slowly and gain more from experience. Successful experienced females and males were not significantly different from each other in relation to successful trophallactic interactions, but had a significantly shorter soliciting duration compared to all other groups, except successful inexperienced females. Trophallactic solicitation success, feeding duration and begging duration were not significantly affected by either SHB sex or experience, supporting the notion that these behaviors are important for survival in host colonies. Overall, success seems to be governed by quality rather than quantity of interactions, thereby probably limiting both SHB energy investment and chance of injury (<1%). Trophallactic solicitation by SHBs is a singular example for an alternative strategy to exploit insect societies without requiring chemical disguise. Hit-and-run trophallaxis is an attractive test system to get an insight into trophallaxis in the social insects.