Fine-tuning and naturalness issues in the two-zero neutrino mass textures

In this paper we analyze the compatibility of two-zero neutrino Majorana textures with the recent experimental data. Differently from previous works, we use the experimental data to fix the values of the non-vanishing mass matrix entries and study in detail the correlations and degree of fine-tuning among them, which is also a measure of how naturally a given texture is able to describe all neutrino data. This information is then used to expand the textures in powers of the Cabibbo angle; extracting random O(1) coefficients, we show that only in few cases such textures reproduce the mixing parameters in their 3 sigma ranges.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figures. Version to appear in NP

Correlation between red cell distribution width and coronary artery disease in patients undergoing elective coronary angiography

Background: Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the primary cause of death in developed countries and is one of the leading causes of disease burden in developing countries. Methods: This descriptive cross-sectional study included 124 purposively selected patients who underwent elective CAG in the department of cardiology, Chittagong medical college hospital, Chattogram, from July 2020 to June 2021. SPSS 23.0 software was used for processing and analysis at the end of the data collection period. Results: According to the Gensini score, patients were categorized into two groups (score <30 and ≥30). There were no significant differences between the two groups concerning BMI, smoking, hypertension, DM, F/H of CAD, statin or beta-blocker use, or the levels of hemoglobin, hematocrit, MCV, MCH MCHC, and creatinine. However, the mean age was older, and there were more males in the severe CAD group. The percentage of dyslipidemia was significantly higher in patients with Gensini score ≥30 than in patients with <30. RDW (OR: 2.629; 95% CI: 1.425-4.484; p=0.002) and age (OR: 1.058; 95%CI: 1.00-1.111; p=0.027) were independently correlated with the severity of CAD. The AUROC for red cell distribution width (RDW) was 0.915 with a p<0.001 for predicting CAD on CAG. It indicated a statistically significant association of RDW with the presence of CAD.  A cut-off value of 13.65% RDW had a sensitivity of 80% and specificity of 84.2% for the prediction of CAD. There were no significant differences between patients with and without angiographic CAD for BMI, hypertension, DM, statin, or beta-blocker use, or of the levels of hemoglobin, hematocrit, MCV, MCH, MCHC, and creatinine. However, the mean age was older, and there were more males in the CAD group. The percentage with dyslipidemia, smoking, and F/H of CAD was significantly higher in patients with CAD than in patients without CAD. The data indicate that only RDW was independently correlated with the presence of CAD (OR: 2.593; 95% CI: 1.347-4.989; p=0.004). Conclusions: RDW is associated with the presence of CAD and suggests that it might be a readily available test for predicting coronary artery diseases

Transcriptome analysis suggests a role for the differential expression of cerebral aquaporins and the MAPK signalling pathway in human temporal lobe epilepsy

Epilepsies are common disorders of the central nervous system (CNS), affecting up to 2% of the global population. Pharmaco-resistance is a major clinical challenge affecting about 30% of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients. Water homeostasis has been shown crucial for regulation of neuronal excitability. The control of water movement is achieved through a family of small integral membrane channel proteins called aquaporins (AQPs). Despite the fact that changes in water homeostasis occur in sclerotic hippocampi of people with TLE, the expression of AQPs in the epileptic brain is not fully characterised. This study uses microarray and ELISA methods to analyse the mRNA and protein expression of the human cerebral AQPs in sclerotic hippocampi (TLE-HS) and adjacent neocortex tissue (TLE-NC) of TLE patients. The expression of AQP1 and AQP4 transcripts was significantly increased, while that of the AQP9 transcript was significantly reduced in TLE-HS compared to TLE-NC. AQP4 protein expression was also increased while expression of AQP1 protein remained unchanged, and AQP9 was undetected. Microarray data analysis identified 3,333 differentially regulated genes and suggested the involvement of the MAPK signalling pathway in TLE pathogenesis. Proteome array data validated the translational profile for 26 genes and within the MAPK pathway (e.g. p38, JNK) that were identified as differentially expressed from microarray analysis. ELISA data showed that p38 and JNK inhibitors decrease AQP4 protein levels in cultured human primary cortical astrocytes. Elucidating the mechanism of selective regulation of different AQPs and associated regulatory proteins may provide a new therapeutic approach to epilepsy treatment. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

Two-zero Textures of the Majorana Neutrino Mass Matrix and Current Experimental Tests

In view of the latest T2K and MINOS neutrino oscillation data which hint at a relatively large theta_13, we perform a systematic study of the Majorana neutrino mass matrix M_nu with two independent texture zeros. We show that three neutrino masses (m_1, m_2, m_3) and three CP-violating phases (delta, rho, sigma) can fully be determined from two neutrino mass-squared differences (delta m^2, Delta m^2) and three flavor mixing angles (theta_12, theta_23, theta_13). We find that seven patterns of M_nu (i.e., A_{1,2}, B_{1,2,3,4} and C) are compatible with current experimental data at the 3-sigma level, but the parameter space of each pattern is more strictly constrained than before. We demonstrate that the texture zeros of M_nu are stable against the one-loop quantum corrections, and there exists a permutation symmetry between Patterns A_1 and A_2, B_1 and B_2 or B_3 and B_4. Phenomenological implications of M_nu on the neutrinoless double-beta decay and leptonic CP violation are discussed, and a realization of those texture zeros by means of the Z_n flavor symmetries is illustrated.Comment: 41 pages, including 4 tables and 14 figures, more discussions added, to appear in JHE

Exploring novel correlations in trilepton channels at the LHC for the minimal supersymmetric inverse seesaw model

We investigate signatures of the minimal supersymmetric inverse seesaw model at the large hadron collider (LHC) with three isolated leptons and large missing energy (3\ell + \mET or 2\ell + 1\tau + \mET, with \ell=e,\mu) in the final state. This signal has its origin in the decay of chargino-neutralino (\chpm1\ntrl2) pair, produced in pp collisions. The two body decays of the lighter chargino into a charged lepton and a singlet sneutrino has a characteristic decay pattern which is correlated with the observed large atmospheric neutrino mixing angle. This correlation is potentially observable at the LHC by looking at the ratios of cross sections of the trilepton + \mET channels in certain flavour specific modes. We show that even after considering possible leading standard model backgrounds these final states can lead to reasonable discovery significance at the LHC with both 7 TeV and 14 TeV center-of-mass energy.Comment: 28 pages, 9 .eps figures. 3 new figures and discussions on LHC observables added, minor modifications in text and in the abstract, 23 new references added, matches with the published version in JHE

Binding Free Energy Landscape of Domain-Peptide Interactions

Peptide recognition domains (PRDs) are ubiquitous protein domains which mediate large numbers of protein interactions in the cell. How these PRDs are able to recognize peptide sequences in a rapid and specific manner is incompletely understood. We explore the peptide binding process of PDZ domains, a large PRD family, from an equilibrium perspective using an all-atom Monte Carlo (MC) approach. Our focus is two different PDZ domains representing two major PDZ classes, I and II. For both domains, a binding free energy surface with a strong bias toward the native bound state is found. Moreover, both domains exhibit a binding process in which the peptides are mostly either bound at the PDZ binding pocket or else interact little with the domain surface. Consistent with this, various binding observables show a temperature dependence well described by a simple two-state model. We also find important differences in the details between the two domains. While both domains exhibit well-defined binding free energy barriers, the class I barrier is significantly weaker than the one for class II. To probe this issue further, we apply our method to a PDZ domain with dual specificity for class I and II peptides, and find an analogous difference in their binding free energy barriers. Lastly, we perform a large number of fixed-temperature MC kinetics trajectories under binding conditions. These trajectories reveal significantly slower binding dynamics for the class II domain relative to class I. Our combined results are consistent with a binding mechanism in which the peptide C terminal residue binds in an initial, rate-limiting step