Soil sealing for urban and infrastructure development constitutes the most intense form of land degradation and affects all ecosystem services. Researchers and policy makers have become aware of this fact and call for limiting development and compensating for new soil sealing with unsealing measures. In a literature review, we found that the state of research about the impacts of soil sealing is far more advanced than about the potential and prerequisites of unsealing. In practice, soil restoration after mining and construction activities as well as redevelopment or renaturation of abandoned industrial sites are increasingly important issues, but systematic research on the success of soil unsealing and restoration is rare. In particular, the development of soils and vegetation after unsealing and restoration measures as well as their potential to provide ecosystem services need more detailed investigation.
In 3 case studies, we demonstrate that replacing a sealed surface with soil to restore ecosystem services is always beneficial for humans and nature. An indicator‐based mapping approach revealed the potential performance of different ecosystem services at former industrial sites in Switzerland. When unsealed sites are transformed to pioneer habitats, the intended vegetation may successfully be regained, but landscape connectivity is hardly enhanced due to increased overall landscape fragmentation. Our investigations show that with the techniques currently applied, the soil physical parameters in a restored agricultural soil developed favourably for crop growth within 15 years. However, unsealed soils are anthropogenic soils with reduced multifunctionality, and protecting natural soil against sealing is always the better option.
Analbuminemia is a rare autosomal recessive disorder manifested by the absence, or severe reduction, of circulating serum albumin (ALB). We report here a new case diagnosed in a 45 years old man of Southwestern Asian origin, living in Switzerland, on the basis of his low ALB concentration (0.9 g/L) in the absence of renal or gastrointestinal protein loss, or liver dysfunction. The clinical diagnosis was confirmed by a mutational analysis of the albumin (ALB) gene, carried out by single-strand conformational polymorphism (SSCP), heteroduplex analysis (HA), and DNA sequencing. This screening of the ALB gene revealed that the proband is homozygous for two mutations: the insertion of a T in a stretch of eight Ts spanning positions c.1289 + 23–c.1289 + 30 of intron 10 and a c.802 G > T transversion in exon 7. Whereas the presence of an additional T in the poly-T tract has no direct deleterious effect, the latter nonsense mutation changes the codon GAA for Glu244 to the stop codon TAA, resulting in a premature termination of the polypeptide chain. The putative protein product would have a length of only 243 amino acid residues instead of the normal 585 found in the mature serum albumin, but no evidence for the presence in serum of such a truncated polypeptide chain could be obtained by two dimensional electrophoresis and western blotting analysis.
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