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The COVID-19 pandemic has had unprecedented health and economic impacts worldwide. Various fields of science approached this topic to better understand the pandemic's spread characteristics and provide a factual base for nonpharmaceutical interventions. One of the interesting non-invasive methodologies, wastewater epidemiology, looks for the correlation between the outcomes of the wastewater-based PCR analysis and the epidemiological situation in their catchment (e.g., Bogler et al., 2020; Farkas et al., 2020). This approach may efficiently predict the outbreak in the endemic phase when the conventional testing is usually underrated. Therefore a visual analytical tool may be beneficial for observing the spatiotemporal correlations of the wastewater indicators and the focal incidence levels. However, based on the analysis of existing tools (Naughton et al., 2021), most dashboards integrating wastewater indicators do not use information about geographical space at all, or the functionality of the map component is limited to the identification of the particular wastewater plant. In the where2test project (www.where2test.de), we established a scalable operational data store (ODS) to automatically collect, store and integrate heterogeneous epidemiology-related data for various administrative levels of several European countries, focusing primarily on the region of Saxony. The project includes various activities, including spatiotemporal analyses (Mertel et al., 2022), epidemiological models and applications (Davoodi et al., 2022), and forecasts. In this paper, we present a prototype of an interactive dashboard to explore the correlation between the local incidence as estimated by conventional testing and the wastewater-based PCR indicators (cT values) in Saxony. Another goal of this application is to focus on the geospatial aspect of these data. The top part of the dashboard features an interactive timeline linked to a multidimensional heatmap. Here, the user can navigate in time and explore the correlation between the epidemiological situation of the neighborhood of the wastewater plants (defined by the temporal distance) and the cT indicators in time. For the week selected in the timeline, the user can observe the spatial context within the Saxonian municipalities on the map below. The map allows interaction with the single municipalities and all the wastewater plants integrated with our ODS to access detailed information and additional charts. In the future, we plan to integrate more metrics and parameters that may be beneficial for exploring spatiotemporal inference. Our scalable infrastructure also easily allows the integration of more wastewater plants. The application is available on www.where2test.de/wastewater from August 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The female reproductive system, the process of oogenesis, and the morphology of the egg capsule of Macrobiotus polonicus were analyzed using transmission and scanning electron microscopy and histochemical methods. The female reproductive system of Macrobiotus polonicus consists of a single ovary and a single oviduct that opens into the cloaca. The seminal receptacle filled with sperm cells is present. The ovary is divided into two parts: a germarium that is filled with oogonia and a vitellarium that is filled with branched clusters of the germ cells. Meroistic oogenesis occurs in the species that was examined. The yolk material is synthesized by the oocyte (autosynthesis) and by the trophocytes and is transported to the oocyte through cytoplasmic bridges. The process of the formation of the egg envelopes starts in the late vitellogenesis. The egg capsule is composed of two envelopes-the vitelline envelope and the three-layered chorion. The vitelline envelope is of the primary type while the chorion is of a secondary type. The surface of the chorion is covered with conical processes that terminate with a strongly indented terminal disc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Zoological Systematics & Evolutionary Research is the property of Hindawi Limited and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Zoological Systematics & Evolutionary Research is the property of Hindawi Limited and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Zoological Systematics & Evolutionary Research is the property of Hindawi Limited and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Zoological Systematics & Evolutionary Research is the property of Hindawi Limited and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Background: The phenomenon of desiccation tolerance, also called anhydrobiosis, involves the ability of an organism to survive the loss of almost all cellular water without sustaining irreversible damage. Although there are several physiological, morphological and ecological studies on tardigrades, only limited DNA sequence information is available. Therefore, we explored the transcriptome in the active and anhydrobiotic state of the tardigrade Milnesium tardigradum which has extraordinary tolerance to desiccation and freezing. In this study, we present the first overview of the transcriptome of M. tardigradum and its response to desiccation and discuss potential parallels to stress responses in other organisms. Results: We sequenced a total of 9984 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from two cDNA libraries from the eutardigrade M. tardigradum in its active and inactive, anhydrobiotic (tun) stage. Assembly of these ESTs resulted in 3283 putative unique transcripts, whereof ~50% showed significant sequence similarity to known genes. The resulting unigenes were functionally annotated using the Gene Ontology (GO) vocabulary. A GO term enrichment analysis revealed several GOs that were significantly underrepresented in the inactive stage. Furthermore we compared the putative unigenes of M. tardigradum with ESTs from two other eutardigrade species that are available from public sequence databases, namely Richtersius coronifer and Hypsibius dujardini. The processed sequences of the three tardigrade species revealed similar functional content and the M. tardigradum dataset contained additional sequences from tardigrades not present in the other two. Conclusions: This study describes novel sequence data from the tardigrade M. tardigradum, which significantly contributes to the available tardigrade sequence data and will help to establish this extraordinary tardigrade as a model for studying anhydrobiosis. Functional comparison of active and anhydrobiotic tardigrades revealed a differential distribution of Gene Ontology terms associated with chromatin structure and the translation machinery, which are underrepresented in the inactive animals. These findings imply a widespread metabolic response of the animals on dehydration. The collective tardigrade transcriptome data will serve as a reference for further studies and support the identification and characterization of genes involved in the anhydrobiotic response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]