Valerie Schmitt

University of Bonn | Uni Bonn · Zoological Research Institute Museum Koenig

The Mediterranean sacoglossan Elysia timida is one of the few sea slug species with the ability to sequester chloroplasts from its food algae and to subsequently store them in a functional state in the digestive gland cells for more than a month, during which time the plastids retain high photosynthetic activity (= long-term retention). Adult E. ti...

Gene transfers from organelles to the nucleus are important in evolution and they are quantitatively great. Studies from higher plants and algae have shown that a substantial proportion of plant genomes, more than 15% in some species, consists of genes that were ultimately acquired from the cyanobacterial ancestor of plastids. Looking back into ear...

A comparative study was performed to analyze differences in evolutionary adaptations in two sea slug species, Elysia timida with long-term retention of endosymbiotic chloroplasts and Thuridilla hopei with short-term retention of endosymbiotic chloroplasts. Both sacoglossan species stem from the same habitat and show similar body sizes and structure...

Sacoglossan sea slugs are unique in the animal kingdom in that they sequester and maintain active plastids that they acquire from the siphonaceous algae upon which they feed, making the animals photosynthetic. Although most sacoglossan species digest their freshly ingested plastids within hours, four species from the family Plakobranchidae retain t...

Background Lupus erythematosus tumidus (LET) is a rare disease which was first described in 1909 but has not always been considered as a separate entity of cutaneous lupus erythematosus (CLE) in the international literature. Objectives To compare characteristic features of different subtypes of CLE and to analyse whether LET can be distinguished as...

A study group of the European Society of Cutaneous Lupus Erythematosus (EUSCLE) developed a Core Set Questionnaire for the evaluation of patients with cutaneous lupus erythematosus (CLE). The aim of the EUSCLE Core Set Questionnaire is to gain a broad and comparable data collection of patients with CLE from different European centers, to achieve co...

Video 2: Hypodermic transfer.

Video 1: Circling and copulation position.

Video 3: Final sperm transfer.

In simultaneous hermaphrodites with copulation and internal fertilization it is often unclear whether reciprocal sperm exchange results from the unconditional willingness of both partners to donate and receive sperm, or whether it follows from a more controlled process such as conditional reciprocal sperm exchange, i.e. sperm trading. While in some...