The Gene Ontology in 2010: extensions and refinements

The Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium (http://www.geneontology.org) (GOC) continues to develop, maintain and use a set of structured, controlled vocabularies for the annotation of genes, gene products and sequences. The GO ontologies are expanding both in content and in structure. Several new relationship types have been introduced and used, along with existing relationships, to create links between and within the GO domains. These improve the representation of biology, facilitate querying, and allow GO developers to systematically check for and correct inconsistencies within the GO. Gene product annotation using GO continues to increase both in the number of total annotations and in species coverage. GO tools, such as OBO-Edit, an ontology-editing tool, and AmiGO, the GOC ontology browser, have seen major improvements in functionality, speed and ease of use.This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the author(s) and published by Oxford University Press. The published article can be found at: http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/

Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay: Status and Prospects

Neutrinoless double-beta decay is a forbidden, lepton-number-violating nuclear transition whose observation would have fundamental implications for neutrino physics, theories beyond the Standard Model, and cosmology. In this review, we summarize the theoretical progress to understand this process, the expectations and implications under various particle physics models, and the nuclear physics challenges that affect the precise predictions of the decay half-life. We also provide a synopsis of the current and future large-scale experiments that aim to discover this process in physically well-motivated half-life ranges. </jats:p

Measurement of cross sections for the 63Cu(alpha,gamma)67Ga reaction from 5.9-8.7 MeV

We have measured cross sections for the 63Cu(alpha,gamma)67Ga reaction in the 5.9-8.7 MeV energy range using an activation technique. Natural Cu foils were bombarded with alpha beams from the 88 Cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Activated foils were counted using gamma spectrometry system at LBNL's Low Background Facility. The 63Cu(alpha,gamma)67Ga cross-sections were determined and compared with the latest NON-SMOKER theoretical values. Experimental cross sections were found to be in agreement with theoretical values

New Cuoricino results and the CUORE project.

CUORICINO is an array of 62 TeO2 bolometers with a total mass of 40.7 Kg (10.4 Kg of 130Te), the largest operating one for a cryogenic experiment. Organized as a 14 storey tower, it is meant as a slightly modified version of one of the 25 towers of the CUORE project, a proposed tightly packed array of 1000 TeO2 bolometers (750 kg of total mass of TeO2) for ultralow-background searches on neutrinoless double beta decay, cold dark matter, solar axions, and rare nuclear decays. CUORICINO data taking started on April 2003 at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) and was stopped in November 2003 to repair the readout wiring system of the 62 bolometers. Detector performance and early background analysis results are reviewed. Preliminary results on ββ(0ν) of 130Te are presented. The expected performance and sensitivity of CUORE is also discussed