[Medical reflections on the Cranach altar in the St. Wolfgang church at Schneeberg/Saxony]. / Medizinische Betrachtungen am Cranach-Altar der St. Wolfgangskirche zu Schneeberg/Erzgebirge.

When looking at some figures of the Cranach altar in the St. Wolfgang church at Schneeberg/Saxony, congenital syphilis and other diseases must be taken into diagnostic consideration. An earlier edition of this magazine contained a reference to a quite similar, possibly luetic saddle nose on a carved figure in the monastery of Waldsassen, which was made almost 200 years later. For iconographical reasons and because of the very early time of its creation around 1530, the deliberate representation of such a diagnosis, at least for Schneeberg, seems doubtful.

Spike-shaped oscillations in the absence of measurable changes in cyclic AMP concentration in a mutant of Dictyostelium discoideum.

Periodic activities of Dictyostelium discoideum cells involve two types of oscillations, spike-shaped and sinusoidal. Spike-shaped oscillations are accompanied by the periodic synthesis and release of cyclic AMP, and cyclic AMP-activated cyclic AMP synthesis is believed to control these oscillations. Experiments described here call into question the importance of cyclic AMP in spike-shaped oscillations. Cell suspensions of strain agip43, an aggregation-deficient mutant of D. discoideum, displayed spike-shaped oscillations in light scattering with period lengths about 1.5 times larger than those of the parent strain. These oscillations were not accompanied by measurable oscillations of cyclic AMP and cyclic GMP. Applied cyclic AMP pulses elicited increases of two- to threefold in the cyclic AMP level and increases of seven- to ninefold in the cyclic GMP concentration. Cyclic AMP additions caused phase shifts in the oscillations of agip43 cells, suggesting that cyclic AMP receptors at the cell surface communicate with the oscillator. We interpret these results in terms of an oscillator not based on cyclic AMP. This oscillator should be coupled to the reaction system involving cyclic AMP synthesis and release. The latter can operate in an oscillatory manner in the parent strain Ax2 but not in mutant agip43.