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Topics in July / August

Aug 18, 2011

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Smart Transplants

Help for horses with osteoarthritis: Smart transplants help the cartilage to regenerate itself.

Veterinary medicine researchers at Freie Universität develop new approach to treating osteoarthritis in dogs and horses

Swollen or stiff joints, foundering, cringing upon contact – in dogs or horses, these symptoms point to a widespread and very painful disease: osteoarthritis. It is a sad diagnosis for animals and their owners, since the joint disease has historically been very difficult to treat, with no prospect of full recovery. Now a treatment method developed by veterinary medicine researchers at Freie Universität offers hope for helping dogs and horses suffering from osteoarthritis.

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Science on a Minute Scale – With a Big Future

At the Center for Supramolecular Interactions, scientists study molecules at the nanoscale.

The Center for Supramolecular Interactions studies interactions between molecules

Molecules are not loners. Like people, they generally live as part of a community, with a wide range of different relationships with other molecules creating cohesion between them. Chemists call these kinds of “communities” of molecules supramolecular assemblies, or “supermolecules.” Plus, as in many other areas, the whole is more than the sum of its parts: The properties of supermolecules are different from those of any of the individual molecules that form them. Researchers at the Center for Supramolecular Interactions (CSI) at Freie Universität Berlin are working to identify the interactions that take place between molecules in order to develop supermolecules with new capabilities – tailor-made for use in medicine, computer technology, or industry.

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A Successful Search

For the past 20 years the horse chestnut miner has been causing major damage to chestnut trees in Europe.

On the origin of the horse-chestnut leaf miner – a talk with Professor H. Walter Lack, Director of the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum, Berlin-Dahlem

These days, walk down any avenue lined with chestnut trees and you can’t miss the signs: brown leaves falling from the trees long before autumn. The cause of this premature leaf fall is the horse-chestnut leaf miner, an invasive leaf-mining moth that has been conquering Europe since the early 1990s. The voracious insects were first found in 1984, on Macedonia’s Lake Ohrid, and in 1986 they were given the scientific name Cameraria ohridella. But this unassuming moth already lived in the Balkans over a century before that – a fact that came to light only recently, in a study performed by an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers headed by Professor H. Walter Lack, of the Botanic Museum of Freie Universität Berlin. Campus.leben spoke with Lack, a professor of biology.
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