6,388 research outputs found
Bovine Rhinitis Viruses Are Common in US Cattle with Bovine Respiratory Disease
Citation: Hause, B. M., Collin, E. A., Anderson, J., Hesse, R. A., & Anderson, G. (2015). Bovine Rhinitis Viruses Are Common in US Cattle with Bovine Respiratory Disease. Plos One, 10(3), 12. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0121998Bovine rhinitis viruses (BRV) are established etiological agents of bovine respiratory disease complex however little research into their epidemiology and ecology has been published for several decades. In the U.S., only bovine rhinitis A virus 1 (BRAV1) has been identified while bovine rhinitis A virus 2 (BRAV2) and bovine rhinitis B virus (BRBV) were previously only identified in England and Japan, respectively. Metagenomic sequencing of a nasal swab from a bovine respiratory disease (BRD) diagnostic submission from Kansas identified contigs with approximately 90% nucleotide similarity to BRAV2 and BRBV. A combination of de novo and templated assemblies using reference genomes yielded near complete BRAV2 and BRBV genomes. The near complete genome of bovine rhinitis A virus 1 (BRAV1) was also determined from a historical isolate to enable further molecular epidemiological studies. A 5'-nuclease reverse transcription PCR assay targeting the 3D polymerase gene was designed and used to screen 204 archived BRD clinical specimens. Thirteen (6.4%) were positive. Metagenomic sequencing of six positive samples identified mixed BRAV1/BRAV2, BRAV1/BRBV and BRAV2/BRBV infections for five samples. One sample showed infection only with BRAV1. Seroprevalence studies using a cell culture adapted BRBV found immunofluorescence assay-reactive antibodies were common in the herds analyzed. Altogether, these results demonstrate that BRV infections are common in cattle with respiratory disease and that BRAV1, BRAV2 and BRBV co-circulate in U.S. cattle and have high similarity to viruses isolated more than 30 years ago from diverse locations
Mapping Low-Density Intergalactic Gas: a Third Helium Lyman-alpha Forest
We present a new HST/STIS spectrum of the z=3.18 quasar PKS 1935-692 and
summarize the spectral features shortwards of 304A in the rest frame likely to
be caused by foreground HeII Lyman-alpha absorption. In accord with previous
results on two other quasars at similar redshifts, we demonstrate a correlation
with the HI Lyman-alpha forest absorption, and show that much of the helium
absorption is caused by a comparable quantity of more diffuse gas with
Omega~0.01, that is not detected in HI. The helium ionization zone around the
quasar is detected as well as a void seen in both HI and HeII. The properties
of the absorption are in broad agreement with those of the other quasars and
with models of the protogalactic gas distribution and ionization at this
redshift.Comment: 17 pages including 5 figures. As accepted for publication in The
Astronomical Journal (minor revisions
Combinatorial Proofs of Fermat\u27s, Lucas\u27s, and Wilson\u27s Theorems
No abstract provided in this article
Novel secondary somatic mutations in Ewing's sarcoma and desmoplastic small round cell tumors.
BackgroundEwing's sarcoma (ES) and desmoplastic small round cell tumors (DSRCT) are small round blue cell tumors driven by an N-terminal containing EWS translocation. Very few somatic mutations have been reported in ES, and none have been identified in DSRCT. The aim of this study is to explore potential actionable mutations in ES and DSRCT.MethodologyTwenty eight patients with ES or DSRCT had tumor tissue available that could be analyzed by one of the following methods: 1) Next-generation exome sequencing platform; 2) Multiplex PCR/Mass Spectroscopy; 3) Polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based single- gene mutation screening; 4) Sanger sequencing; 5) Morphoproteomics.Principal findingsNovel somatic mutations were identified in four out of 18 patients with advanced ES and two of 10 patients with advanced DSRCT (six out of 28 (21.4%));KRAS (n = 1), PTPRD (n = 1), GRB10 (n = 2), MET (n = 2) and PIK3CA (n = 1). One patient with both PTPRD and GRB10 mutations and one with a GRB10 mutation achieved a complete remission (CR) on an Insulin like growth factor 1 receptor (IGF1R) inhibitor based treatment. One patient, who achieved a partial remission (PR) with IGF1R inhibitor treatment, but later developed resistance, demonstrated a KRAS mutation in the post-treatment resistant tumor, but not in the pre-treatment tumor suggesting that the RAF/RAS/MEK pathway was activated with progression.ConclusionsWe have reported several different mutations in advanced ES and DSRCT that have direct implications for molecularly-directed targeted therapy. Our technology agnostic approach provides an initial mutational roadmap used in the path towards individualized combination therapy
Single-qubit unitary gates by graph scattering
We consider the effects of plane-wave states scattering off finite graphs, as
an approach to implementing single-qubit unitary operations within the
continuous-time quantum walk framework of universal quantum computation. Four
semi-infinite tails are attached at arbitrary points of a given graph,
representing the input and output registers of a single qubit. For a range of
momentum eigenstates, we enumerate all of the graphs with up to vertices
for which the scattering implements a single-qubit gate. As increases, the
number of new unitary operations increases exponentially, and for the
majority correspond to rotations about axes distributed roughly uniformly
across the Bloch sphere. Rotations by both rational and irrational multiples of
are found.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure
A quantum mechanical model of the upper bounds of the cascading contribution to the second hyperpolarizability
Microscopic cascading of second-order nonlinearities between two molecules
has been proposed to yield an enhanced third-order molecular nonlinear-optical
response. In this contribution, we investigate the two-molecule cascaded second
hyperpolarizability and show that it will never exceed the fundamental limit of
a single molecule with the same number of electrons as the two-molecule system.
We show the apparent divergence behavior of the cascading contribution to the
second hyperpolarizability vanishes when properly taking into account the
intermolecular interactions. Although cascading can never lead to a larger
nonlinear-optical response than a single molecule, it provides alternative
molecular design configurations for creating materials with large third-order
susceptibilities that may be difficult to design into a single molecule.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, 1 tabl
Indicator patterns of forced change learned by an artificial neural network
Many problems in climate science require the identification of signals
obscured by both the "noise" of internal climate variability and differences
across models. Following previous work, we train an artificial neural network
(ANN) to identify the year of input maps of temperature and precipitation from
forced climate model simulations. This prediction task requires the ANN to
learn forced patterns of change amidst a background of climate noise and model
differences. We then apply a neural network visualization technique (layerwise
relevance propagation) to visualize the spatial patterns that lead the ANN to
successfully predict the year. These spatial patterns thus serve as "reliable
indicators" of the forced change. The architecture of the ANN is chosen such
that these indicators vary in time, thus capturing the evolving nature of
regional signals of change. Results are compared to those of more standard
approaches like signal-to-noise ratios and multi-linear regression in order to
gain intuition about the reliable indicators identified by the ANN. We then
apply an additional visualization tool (backward optimization) to highlight
where disagreements in simulated and observed patterns of change are most
important for the prediction of the year. This work demonstrates that ANNs and
their visualization tools make a powerful pair for extracting climate patterns
of forced change.Comment: The first version of this manuscript has been submitted to the
Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES), 202
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