Enzymes of the St8Sia family, a subgroup of the glycosyltransferases, mediate the transfer of sialic acid to glycoproteins or glycolipids. Here, we describe the cloning of the zebrafish St8SiaIII gene and study its developmental activity. A conserved synteny relationship among vertebrate chromosome regions containing St8SiaIII loci underscores an ancient duplication of this gene in the teleost fish lineage and a specific secondary loss of one paralog in the zebrafish. The single zebrafish St8SiaIII enzyme, which is expected to function as an oligosialyltransferase, lacks maternal activity, is weakly expressed during nervous system development, and shows a highly dynamic expression pattern in somites and somitederived structures. Morpholino knock-down of St8SiaIII leads to anomalous somite morphologies, including defects in segment boundary formation and myotendious-junction integrity. These phenotypes hint for a basic activity of zebrafish St8SiaIII during segmentation and somite formation, providing novel evidence for a non-neuronal function of sialyltransferases during vertebrate development. Developmental Dynamics 237:808 -818, 2008.

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Permanent monitoring of airborne bacteria is an essential tool to ensure clean and safe environment in locations such as hospital surrounding, metro stations, airports, or for big events like international sport events. Lab-on-a-chip systems are very promising approaches for a decentralized continuous pathogen monitoring. The overall system presented here consisted of a microtiter plate sized consumable and respective instrument allowing for the detection of airborne biological pathogens. The target pathogens to be detected were Yersinia pestis, Francisella tularensis, Burkholderia mallei, Burkholderia pseudomallei, Brucella melitensis, Brucella abortis, Coxiella burnetti, and Bacillus anthracis. Important to stress is that the technical platform can be easily extended to further pathogens. Apart from the implementation of the full assay process from on-chip pathogen trapping to detection, two main achievements were made: On one hand, the surface of the immunoassay can be used over a longer period of continuous monitoring of negative results despite being flushed permanently. For the case of positive results, the system will trigger an alert and the chip will be disposed. On the other hand, a PCR protocol in respect to temperature and cycle timing was developed allowing running no less than eight target PCRs with the same protocol.