Oral and Poster Papers Submitted for Presentation at the 5th Congress of the EUGMS “Geriatric Medicine in a Time of Generational Shift September 3–6, 2008 Copenhagen, Denmark

Inter-laboratory evaluation of the ISO standard 11063 "Soil quality -- Method to directly extract DNA from soil samples"

International audience; Extracting DNA directly from micro-organisms living in soil is a crucial step for the molecular analysis of soil microbial communities. However, the use of a plethora of different soil DNA extraction protocols, each with its own bias, makes accurate data comparison difficult. To overcome this problem, a method for soil DNA extraction was proposed to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 2006. This method was evaluated by 13 independent European laboratories actively participating in national and international ring tests. The reproducibility of the standardized method for molecular analyses was evaluated by comparing the amount of DNA extracted, …

METing SUSY on the Z peak

Recently the ATLAS experiment announced a 3 $\sigma$ excess at the Z-peak consisting of 29 pairs of leptons together with two or more jets, $E_T^{\rm miss}> 225$ GeV and $H_T \geq 600$ GeV, to be compared with $10.6 \pm 3.2$ expected lepton pairs in the Standard Model. No excess outside the Z-peak was observed. By trying to explain this signal with SUSY we find that only relatively light gluinos, $m_{\tilde g} \lesssim 1.2$ TeV, together with a heavy neutralino NLSP of $m_{\tilde \chi} \gtrsim 400$ GeV decaying predominantly to Z-boson plus a light gravitino, such that nearly every gluino produces at least one Z-boson in its decay chain, could reproduce the excess. We construct an explicit …