Large quantities of the antibiotic florfenicol are used in animal farming and aquaculture, contaminating the ecosystem with antibiotic residues and promoting antimicrobial resistance, ultimately leading to untreatable multidrug-resistant pathogens. Florfenicol-resistant bacteria often activate export mechanisms that result in resistance to various structurally unrelated antibiotics. We devised novel strategies for the enzymatic inactivation of florfenicol in different media, such as saltwater or milk. Using a combinatorial approach and selection, we optimized a hydrolase (EstDL136) for florfenicol cleavage. Reaction kinetics were followed by time-resolved NMR spectroscopy. Importantly, the hydrolase remained active in different media, such as saltwater or cow milk. Various environmentally-friendly application strategies for florfenicol inactivation were developed using the optimized hydrolase. As a potential filter device for cost-effective treatment of waste milk or aquacultural wastewater, the hydrolase was immobilized on Ni-NTA agarose or silica as carrier materials. In two further application examples, the hydrolase was used as cell extract or encapsulated with a semi-permeable membrane. This facilitated, for example, florfenicol inactivation in whole milk, which can help to treat waste milk from medicated cows, to be fed to calves without the risk of inducing antibiotic resistance. Enzymatic inactivation of antibiotics, in general, enables therapeutic intervention without promoting antibiotic resistance.

The Covid-19 pandemic imposed new constraints on empirical research and forced researchers to transfer from traditional laboratory research to the online environment. This study tested the validity of a web-based episodic memory paradigm by comparing participants’ memory performance for trustworthy and untrustworthy facial stimuli in a supervised laboratory setting and an unsupervised web setting. Consistent with previous results, we observed enhanced episodic memory for untrustworthy compared to trustworthy faces. Most importantly, this memory bias was comparable in the online and the laboratory experiment, suggesting that web-based procedures are a promising tool for memory research.

Cognitive resources contribute to balance control. There is evidence that mental fatigue reduces cognitive resources and impairs balance performance, particularly in older adults and when balance tasks are complex, for example when trying to walk or stand while concurrently performing a secondary cognitive task. We conducted a systematic literature search in PubMed (MEDLINE), Web of Science and Google Scholar to identify eligible studies and performed a random effects meta-analysis to quantify the effects of experimentally induced mental fatigue on balance performance in healthy adults. Subgroup analyses were computed for age (healthy young vs. healthy older adults) and balance task complexity (balance tasks with high complexity vs. balance tasks with low complexity) to examine the moderating effects of these factors on fatigue-mediated balance performance. We identified 7 eligible studies with 9 study groups and 206 participants. Analysis revealed that performing a prolonged cognitive task had a small but significant effect (SMDwm = −0.38) on subsequent balance performance in healthy young and older adults. However, age- and task-related differences in balance responses to fatigue could not be confirmed statistically. Overall, aggregation of the available literature indicates that mental fatigue generally reduces balance in healthy adults. However, interactions between cognitive resource reduction, aging and balance task complexity remain elusive.

Effects of aging on lexical processing are well attested, but the picture is less clear for grammatical processing. Where age differences emerge, these are usually ascribed to working-memory (WM) decline. Previous studies on the influence of WM on agreement computation have yielded inconclusive results, and work on aging and subject-verb agreement processing is lacking. In two experiments (Experiment 1: timed grammaticality judgment, Experiment 2: self-paced reading + WM test), we investigated older (OA) and younger (YA) adults’ susceptibility to agreement attraction errors. We found longer reading latencies and judgment reaction times (RTs) for OAs. Further, OAs, particularly those with low WM scores, were more accepting of sentences with attraction errors than YAs. OAs showed longer reading latencies for ungrammatical sentences, again modulated by WM, than YAs. Our results indicate that OAs have greater difficulty blocking intervening nouns from interfering with the computation of agreement dependencies. WM can modulate this effect.

Factorial experiments in research on memory, language, and in other areas are often analyzed using analysis of variance (ANOVA). However, for effects with more than one numerator degrees of freedom, e.g., for experimental factors with more than two levels, the ANOVA omnibus F-test is not informative about the source of a main effect or interaction. Because researchers typically have specific hypotheses about which condition means differ from each other, a priori contrasts (i.e., comparisons planned before the sample means are known) between specific conditions or combinations of conditions are the appropriate way to represent such hypotheses in the statistical model. Many researchers have pointed out that contrasts should be "tested instead of, rather than as a supplement to, the ordinary 'omnibus' F test" (Hays, 1973, p. 601). In this tutorial, we explain the mathematics underlying different kinds of contrasts (i.e., treatment, sum, repeated, polynomial, custom, nested, interaction contrasts), discuss their properties, and demonstrate how they are applied in the R System for Statistical Computing (R Core Team, 2018). In this context, we explain the generalized inverse which is needed to compute the coefficients for contrasts that test hypotheses that are not covered by the default set of contrasts. A detailed understanding of contrast coding is crucial for successful and correct specification in linear models (including linear mixed models). Contrasts defined a priori yield far more useful confirmatory tests of experimental hypotheses than standard omnibus F-tests. Reproducible code is available from https://osf.io/7ukf6/.