Immunopathogenesis of canine chronic ulcerative stomatitis.

Canine Chronic Ulcerative Stomatitis is a spontaneously occurring inflammatory disease of the oral mucosa. An immune-mediated pathogenesis is suspected though not yet proven. We have recently reported on the clinical and histologic features, and identification of select leukocyte cell populations within the lesion. A clinical and histologic similarity to oral lichen planus of people was proposed. In the present study, these initial observations are extended by examining lesions from 24 dogs with clinical evidence of chronic ulcerative stomatitis. Because dogs with chronic ulcerative stomatitis often have concurrent periodontal disease, we wondered if dental plaque/biofilm may be a common instigator of inflammation in both lesions. We hypothesized that dogs with chronic ulcerative stomatitis would exhibit a spectrum of pathologic changes and phenotype of infiltrating leukocytes that would inform lesion pathogenesis and that these changes would differ from inflammatory phenotypes in periodontitis. Previously we identified chronic ulcerative stomatitis lesions to be rich in FoxP3+ and IL17+ cells. As such, we suspect that these leukocytes play an important role in lesion pathogenesis. The current study confirms the presence of moderate to large numbers of FoxP3+ T cells and IL17+ cells in all ulcerative stomatitis lesions using confocal immunofluorescence. Interestingly, the majority of IL17+ cells were determined to be non-T cells and IL17+ cell frequencies were negatively correlated with severity on the clinical scoring system. Three histologic subtypes of ulcerative stomatitis were determined; lichenoid, deep stomatitis and granulomatous. Periodontitis lesions, like stomatitis lesions, were B cell and plasma cell rich, but otherwise differed from the stomatitis lesions. Direct immunofluorescence results did not support an autoantibody-mediated autoimmune disease process. This investigation contributes to the body of literature regarding leukocyte involvement in canine idiopathic inflammatory disease pathogenesis

Informal Savings and Credit Institutions in the Urban Areas: The Case of Cooperative Credit Unions

Less developed countries are usually characterized by a dualistic financial system: the formal and informal credit system. One form of the latter is the Cooperative Credit Union (CCU), which at present finds shelter in the private and government offices as well as in public markets. Analysis presented in this paper points to the fact that the ten sample CCUs have performed well without government subsidies. Without regulation, they are more likely to introduce more innovations. However, to successfully develop a cooperative, a concerted effort should be developed among leaders.informal financial sectors, credit unions, credit program, credit market, savings

Monitoring the CMS strip tracker readout system

The CMS Silicon Strip Tracker at the LHC comprises a sensitive area of approximately 200 m2 and 10 million readout channels. Its data acquisition system is based around a custom analogue front-end chip. Both the control and the readout of the front-end electronics are performed by off-detector VME boards in the counting room, which digitise the raw event data and perform zero-suppression and formatting. The data acquisition system uses the CMS online software framework to configure, control and monitor the hardware components and steer the data acquisition. The first data analysis is performed online within the official CMS reconstruction framework, which provides many services, such as distributed analysis, access to geometry and conditions data, and a Data Quality Monitoring tool based on the online physics reconstruction. The data acquisition monitoring of the Strip Tracker uses both the data acquisition and the reconstruction software frameworks in order to provide real-time feedback to shifters on the operational state of the detector, archiving for later analysis and possibly trigger automatic recovery actions in case of errors. Here we review the proposed architecture of the monitoring system and we describe its software components, which are already in place, the various monitoring streams available, and our experiences of operating and monitoring a large-scale system

Doubly charmed tetraquarks in a diquark-antidiquark model

We study the spectra of the doubly charmed tetraquark states in a diquark-antidiquark model. The doubly charmed tetraquark states form an antitriplet and a sextet configurations according to flavor SU(3) symmetry. For the tetraquark state $[qq'][\bar c\bar c]$, we show the mass for both bound and excited states. The two-body decays of tetraquark states $T^{cc}[0^+]$ and $T^{cc}[1^{--}]$ to charmed mesons have also been studied. In the end,the doubly charmed tetraquarks decays to a charmed baryon and a light baryon have been studied in the SU(3) flavor symmetry.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures and six table

Electrifying enzymatic bioproduction

A microbial battery couples waste degradation to a specific enzymatic production process. This is enabled by the uncoupling of the waste oxidation process from the enzymatic bioproduction via redox cathodes. The approach can be attractive for small-scale, local production of chemicals from water and/or CO2

Accelerator Design for the CHESS-U Upgrade

During the summer and fall of 2018 the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) is undergoing an upgrade to increase high-energy flux for x-ray users. The upgrade requires replacing one-sixth of the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR), inverting the polarity of half of the CHESS beam lines, and switching to single-beam on-axis operation. The new sextant is comprised of six double-bend achromats (DBAs) with combined-function dipole-quadrupoles. Although the DBA design is widely utilized and well understood, the constraints for the CESR modifications make the CHESS-U lattice unique. This paper describes the design objectives, constraints, and implementation for the CESR accelerator upgrade for CHESS-U