Using herbarium samples for NGS methods – a methodological comparison

Herbaria harbor a tremendous amount of plant specimens that are rarely used for plant systematic studies. The main reason is the difficulty to extract a decent quantity of good quality DNA from the preserved plant material. While the extraction of ancient DNA in animals is well established, studies including old plant material are still underrepresented. In our study we compared the standard Qiagen DNeasy Plant Mini Kit and a specific PTB-DTT protocol on to two different plant genera (Xanthium L. and Salix L.). The included herbarium material covered about two centuries of plant collections. A selected subset of samples was used for a standard library preparation as well as a target enrichment approach. The results revealed that PTB-PTT resulted in higher quantity and quality regarding DNA yield. Despite the lower overall yield of DNA, the Qiagen Kit resulted in better sequencing results regarding the number of filtered and mapped reads. We were able to successfully sequence a sample from 1820 and conclude that it is possible to include old herbarium specimens in NGS approaches. This opens a treasure box in phylogenomic research.

Size Spectra of Pelagic Fish Populations in a Deep Lake—Methodological Comparison between Hydroacoustics and Midwater Trawling

Net sampling by trawling and hydroacoustics was used to methodologically compare size spectra (SS) of the pelagic fish community in a deep lake across 12 years of sampling. Hydroacoustic SS were generated based on either single-echo detections (SEDs) or tracked-echo groups (TEGs) from 20 cross-lake transects. Trawl SS were obtained by a midwater trawl in four pelagic depth layers. All SS were derived from maximum likelihood estimations of exponent b of a continuous fish body mass distribution. The arithmetic mean exponent b was similar for all methods, and there were no significant differences of b among the three methods across years. However, visual inspection indicated that the SS differed considerably between trawling and hydroacoustics in some of the years, primarily when high densities of 0+ coregonid fishes were strongly spatially aggregated and hence caught by the trawl. Accordingly, there was no correlation between SS generated by trawling and hydroacoustics. In contrast, SS generated by SEDs and TEGs were significantly correlated, indicating reliability and reproducibility of obtaining SS by hydroacoustics. The SS estimated by TEGs revealed a positive trend of exponent b over the years since 2005, potentially reflecting the recent eutrophication of Lake Stechlin, which may lead to higher fish growth rates. We conclude that hydroacoustics may help to generate more precise SS of the pelagic fish community in our study lake than midwater trawling. However, the truthfulness of SS estimates cannot be evaluated because of the inherent difficulty in determining the true densities and sizes of fishes in lakes.

Turkey's Ombudsman Institution as a Control Mechanism for the Effectiveness of Public Administration

The subject of this study is to investigate how the Ombudsman Institution of Turkey (KDK) establishes itself as a control device regarding the Turkish public administration practices. In the study, the historical development of the ombudsman institution with various country cases will be examined, and the functionality of the Ombudsman Institution of Turkey will be evaluated. The decisions taken by the Ombudsman Institution in Turkey will be evaluated for the orderly functioning of public administration from the aspects of both the administration and citizens perspectives. While evaluating the extent to which the Ombudsman Institution of Turkey differs from other country practices, a methodological comparison will be made within this framework. In this chapter, the effectiveness of the Ombudsman Institution of Turkey will be discussed and the impact of the Ombudsman's decisions on the administration will be evaluated. Moreover, it will be questioned what kind of deficiencies the Ombudsman Institution have in terms of application, and potential policy responses will be investigated.