Investigation of bovine interleukin-6 gene polymorphism and its association with Cryptosporidium infection in calves

ΔΕΝ ΔΙΑΤΙΘΕΤΑΙ ΠΕΡΙΛΗΨΗInterleukin-6 (IL-6) is associated with inflammatory diseases, but its connection with Cryptosporidium in Holstein calves remains unknown. This study aimed to investigate the effect of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of IL-6 on the resistance and susceptibility to Cryptosporidium in calves and to prepare a phylogenetictree in order to show the relation between Cryptosporidium species. Seventy-two samples were studied from healthy and infected with Cryptosporidium calves and genotyped using the tetra amplification refractory mutation system (ARMS). The phylogenetic tree was constructed by the neighbor-joining method using the MEGA 7.0 software. The results showed a frequency of 76.40% for T allele and 23.60% for C allele in the healthy calves, while the results showed a frequency of 73.60% for T allele and 26.40% for C allele in calves infected with Cryptosporidium. The results did not reveal a significant difference between healthy and infectious animals according to the allele frequency (P=0.637). The phylogenetic tree demonstrated that C. parvum (HQ259589.1) with an 81% bootstrap were clustered with C. hominis (KM012041.1). The results also indicated that C. parvum (HQ259589.1) and C. hominis (KM012041.1) had a common ancestor with C. cuniculus. Additionally, C. andersoni(HQ259590.1) with an 88% bootstrap of support was placed in the same clade of C. muris (L19069.1), and both of them had a common ancestor with C. serpentis(KF240618.1). Further studies are required to investigate the relation between SNPs of IL-6 in other regions and the resistance or susceptibility to Cryptosporidium in calves

The Potential of Exozodiacal Disks Observations with the WFIRST Coronagraph Instrument

The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) will be the first high-performance stellar coronagraph using active wavefront control for deep starlight suppression in space, providing unprecedented levels of contrast, spatial resolution, and sensitivity for astronomical observations in the optical. One science case enabled by the CGI will be taking images and(R~50)spectra of faint interplanetary dust structures present in the habitable zone of nearby sunlike stars (~10 pc) and within the snow-line of more distant ones(~20pc), down to dust density levels commensurate with that of the solar system zodiacal cloud. Reaching contrast levels below~10-7 for the first time, CGI will cross an important threshold in debris disks physics, accessing disks with low enough optical depths that their structure is dominated by transport phenomena than collisions. Hence, CGI results will be crucial for determining how exozodiacal dust grains are produced and transported in low-density disks around mature stars. Additionally, CGI will be able to measure the brightness level and constrain the degree of asymmetry of exozodiacal clouds around individual nearby sunlike stars in the optical, at the ~10x solar zodiacal emission level. This information will be extremely valuable for optimizing the observational strategy of possible future exo-Earth direct imaging missions, especially those planning to operate at optical wavelengths, such as Habitable Exoplanet Observatory (HabEx) and the Large Ultraviolet/Optical/Infrared Surveyor (LUVOIR)

An Excess of Jupiter Analogs in Super-Earth Systems

We use radial velocity (RV) observations to search for long-period gas giant companions in systems hosting inner super-Earth (1–4 R⊕, 1–10 M⊕) planets to constrain formation and migration scenarios for this population. We consistently refit published RV data sets for 65 stars and find nine systems with statistically significant trends indicating the presence of an outer companion. We combine these RV data with AO images to constrain the masses and semi-major axes of these companions. We quantify our sensitivity to the presence of long-period companions by fitting the sample with a power-law distribution and find an occurrence rate of 39% ± 7% for companions 0.5–20 M_(Jup) and 1–20 au. Half of our systems were discovered by the transit method, and half were discovered by the RV method. While differences in the RV baselines and number of data points between the two samples lead to different sensitivities to distant companions, we find that occurrence rates of gas giant companions in each sample are consistent at the 0.5σ level. We compare the frequency of Jupiter analogs in these systems to the equivalent rate from field star surveys and find that Jupiter analogs are more common around stars hosting super-Earths. We conclude that the presence of outer gas giants does not suppress the formation of inner super-Earths, and that these two populations of planets instead appear to be correlated. We also find that the stellar metallicities of systems with gas giant companions are higher than those without companions, in agreement with the well-established metallicity correlation from RV surveys of field stars

Paving the Way to Future Missions: the Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph Technology Demonstration

This document summarizes how far the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph Instrument (Roman CGI) will go toward demonstrating high-contrast imaging and spectroscopic requirements for potential future exoplanet direct imaging missions, illustrated by the HabEx and LUVOIR concepts. The assessment is made for two levels of assumed CGI performance: (i) current best estimate (CBE) as of August 2020, based on laboratory results and realistic end-to-end simulations with JPL-standard Model Uncertainty Factors (MUFs); (ii) CGI design specifications inherited from Phase B requirements. We find that the predicted performance (CBE) of many CGI subsystems compares favorably with the needs of future missions, despite providing more modest point source detection limits than future missions. This is essentially due to the challenging pupil of the Roman Space Telescope; this pupil pushes the coronagraph masks sensitivities to misalignments to be commensurate with future missions. In particular, CGI will demonstrate active low-order wavefront control and photon counting capabilities at levels of performance either higher than, or comparable to, the needs of future missions.Comment: 10 pages, 3 tables. Revised version v2: added some co-author

Near-infrared Imaging of a Spiral in the CQ Tau Disk

We present L'-band Keck/NIRC2 imaging and H-band Subaru/AO188+HiCIAO polarimetric observations of the CQ Tau disk with a new spiral arm. Apart from the spiral feature, our observations could not detect any companion candidates. We traced the spiral feature from the r[SUP]2[/SUP]-scaled High-Contrast Coronographic Imager for Adaptive Optics (HiCIAO) polarimetric intensity image and the fitted result is used for forward modeling to reproduce the ADI-reduced NIRC2 image. We estimated the original surface brightness after throughput correction in the L' band to be ∼126 mJy arcsec[SUP]-2[/SUP] at most. We suggest that the grain temperature of the spiral may be heated up to ∼200 K in order to explain both of the H- and L'-band results. The H-band emission at the location of the spiral originates from the scattering from the disk surface while both scattering and thermal emission may contribute to the L'-band emission. If the central star is only the light source of scattered light, the spiral emission at the L' band should be thermal emission. If an inner disk also acts as the light source, the scattered light and the thermal emission may equally contribute to the L'-band spiral structure