Aberrant choroid plexus formation drives the development of treatment-related brain toxicity

Brain tumors are commonly treated with radiotherapy, but the efficacy of the treatment is limited by its toxicity to the normal tissue including post-irradiation contrast enhanced lesions often linked to necrosis. The poorly understood mechanisms behind such brain lesions were studied using cerebral organoids. Here we show that irradiation of such organoids leads to dose-dependent growth retardation and formation of liquid-filled cavities but is not correlated with necrosis. Instead, the radiation-induced changes comprise of an enhancement of cortical hem markers, altered neuroepithelial stem cell differentiation, and an increase of ZO1+/AQP1+/CLDN3+-choroid plexus (CP)-like structures accompanied by an upregulation of IGF2 mRNA, known to be expressed in CP and cerebrospinal fluid. The altered differentiation is attributed to changes in the WNT/BMP signaling pathways. We conclude that aberrant CP formation can be involved in radiation-induced brain lesions providing additional strategies for possible countermeasures

The description of the steps of the Q&A test and detector module assembly of the CBM-STS

The Silicon Tracking System (STS) is the core detector system of the Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM)experiment at FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research). The CBM will study matter at the highestbaryonic densities in collisions of nuclear beams with a stationary target. The expected long latency foridentification and the changing signature of the events drive us to use self-triggered streaming readout. TheCBM data collection will be based on time-stamped detector data into a compute farm. Event reconstructionand physics analysis are performed online at up to 10 MHz collision rates. In the presented work, we willdiscuss step-by-step how the CBM-STS detector components are rigorously selected and prepared for assembly.It starts with carefully testing the readout ASICs. The various parameters are recorded to select the chip. Thenext step is to test the micro cable’s TAB (Tape Automated Bonding) bonding quality on the ASIC. Later, the16-chip cables are bonded to the silicon strip sensor. All test results are stored and available for later usein a specially designed database using custom software applied to each step in the assembly process. Afterassembly of 1/3 of the modules (896), we will overview the acquired experience

Renormalization-group consistent treatment of color superconductivity in the NJL model

The Nambu–Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model and specifically its extension to color superconductivity (CSC) is a popular effective model for investigating dense quark matter. However, the reliability of its results is challenged by cutoff artifacts, which emerge if temperature or chemical potential are of the order of the cutoff energy scales. In this work, we generalize an idea from Braun et al. [SciPost Phys. 6, 056 (2019)], which is based on the requirement of renormalization-group (RG) consistency and has successfully been applied to the two-flavor quark-meson-diquark model, to the NJL model for electrically and color-neutral three-flavor color-superconducting quark matter. To this end, we analyze the medium divergences of the model and eliminate them by appropriate counterterms, introducing three different schemes. We show that the RG consistent treatment removes the cutoff artifacts of the conventional regularization and enables the investigation of CSC matter at higher densities by the model. Our studies reveal the emergence of a so-called d-quark superconducting (dSC) phase within the melting pattern of the color-flavor locked phase at high chemical potentials, consistent with earlier Ginzburg-Landau analyses