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Microalgae store chemical energy as lipids. They include a large number of high-quality, poly-unsaturated fatty acids, which are essential for human nutrition and health.

Researchers from Goethe University in Frankfurt developed a method to increase the concentration of lipids in microalgae significantly by genetical manipulation of the enzyme TAG lipase.

Legionella are aerobic bacteria which appear naturally in all surface water and groundwater. From there, despite water treatment, and through raw water they can reach the drinking water systems and other water transporting installations. The invention LegiGuard is a fully automated minilab for the qualitative and quantitative determination of legionella in water pipes for e.g. drinking water. The device is able to take a defined volume of water from the water stream and to determine the existing amount of legionella. For this purpose, fluorescently labeled immunobeads are used, allowing easy detection of presence of legionella. The result is directly and electronically communicated to the user, after 1.5 – 2 hours.

Beta lactones are synthetically produced small molecules that tremendously reduce the pathogenicity of Staphylococcus aureus and MRSA. They act by inhibiting the caseinolytic protease P (ClpP), a key regulator of multiple virulence factors. Thereby the production of detrimental bacterial toxins (i.e. hemolysins, toxic shock syndrome toxin, enterotoxins) is prevented resulting in disarming the bacteria during infection. Bacterial killing and clearance can therefore be achieved through the action of the immune system.
Importantly, the concept of antivirulence prevents both the biggest challenges in antibiotic treatment today: resistance development and side effects. This also allows for longer treatment periods.

A newly developed method for water treatment makes it possible to reduce costs of investment as well as energy consumption of conventional seawater desalination plants. The method comprises an innovative, environment-friendly und energy efficient solution, which is suitable for desalination as well as for process water treatment from oil or gas industry, mining, electroplating, food industry and Zero Liquid Discharge – ZLD.

Tailored to the current practical requirements, the FoBt Sensor has been developed by the Institute of Nanotechnologies and Optical Technologies (iNano) at the Niederrhein University of Applied Science. Persistent and unrecognized moisture lead to moisture damage and loss of quality on different kinds of products. The novel optical fiber sensor (FoBt Sensor) from iNano combines the detection of water condensation on the probe tip surface with an active determination of the condensation rate and the temperature measurement at the sensor head. This is made possible through the application of the optical fiber sensor principle and the special design of the probe tip.

Interference is one of the most performance-limiting factors in wireless communications systems. The standard of 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) employs Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) in the downlink, where orthogonality between different users within one cell can be guaranteed by scheduling simultaneously in frequency and time domain. However, LTE is designed to consider a frequency reuse factor of one between adjacent cells leading to strong inter-cell-interference between adjacent cells.
Users especially located at cell edges may experience strong interference by transmissions from neighboring cells, scheduling their users at the same physical resource. Thus, intercell interference coordination (ICIC) techniques are an indispensable and widely discussed topic in the standardization process of LTE.
Scientists at the Department of Communications Engineering at the University of Bremen developed a coordination scheme to improve the reallocation procedure of succeeding pre-coding matrices, while avoiding sudden change in the inter-cell interference experienced at neighboring cells. To do so, they use the fact that different matrix combinations exhibit lower variations in the inter-cell-interference than others. The advantage of this approach is that the variation of the interference level is only determined by the two pre-coding matrices of the allocation, and not by further network, mobile devices or transmission specific parameters
This will lead to significant improvement on system performance on mobile devices to an edge of a cell or located next to base stations as well of base stations without impact on LTE standard. Besides, network stability is also improved.
Up to now, simulations of the computer-implemented method are successful.