2,761 research outputs found
Comparative Analysis of the Major Polypeptides from Liver Gap Junctions and Lens Fiber Junctions
Gap junctions from rat liver and fiber junctions from bovine lens have similar septilaminar profiles when examined by thin-section electron microscopy and differ only slightly with respect to the packing of intramembrane particles in freeze-fracture images. These similarities have often led to lens fiber junctions being referred to as gap junctions. Junctions from both sources were isolated as enriched subcellular fractions and their major polypeptide components compared biochemically and immunochemically. The major liver gap junction polypeptide has an apparent molecular weight of 27,000, while a 25,000-dalton polypeptide is the major component of lens fiber junctions. The two polypeptides are not homologous when compared by partial peptide mapping in SDS. In addition, there is not detectable antigenic similarity between the two polypeptides by immunochemical criteria using antibodies to the 25,000-dalton lens fiber junction polypeptide. Thus, in spite of the ultrastructural similarities, the gap junction and the lens fiber junction are comprised of distinctly different polypeptides, suggesting that the lens fiber junction contains a unique gene product and potentially different physiological properties
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health of the Aldabra Group, Southern Seychelles: Scientific Report to the Government of Seychelles.
National Geographic's Pristine Seas project, in collaboration with the government of the Seychelles, the Island Conservation Society (ICS), the Seychelles Islands Foundation (SIF), and the Waitt Foundation, conducted an expedition to explore the poorly known marine environment around these islands. The goals were to assess the biodiversity of the nearshore marine environment and to survey the largely unknown deep sea realm. The data collected contribute to the marine spatial planning of the Seychelles, in particular the creation of large marine reserves
Quasi-local contribution to the scalar self-force: Non-geodesic Motion
We extend our previous calculation of the quasi-local contribution to the
self-force on a scalar particle to general (not necessarily geodesic) motion in
a general spacetime. In addition to the general case and the case of a particle
at rest in a stationary spacetime, we consider as examples a particle held at
rest in Reissner-Nordstrom and Kerr-Newman space-times. This allows us to most
easily analyse the effect of non-geodesic motion on our previous results and
also allows for comparison to existing results for Schwarzschild spacetime.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, corrected typo in Eq. 2.
Algebraic approach to quantum field theory on non-globally-hyperbolic spacetimes
The mathematical formalism for linear quantum field theory on curved
spacetime depends in an essential way on the assumption of global
hyperbolicity. Physically, what lie at the foundation of any formalism for
quantization in curved spacetime are the canonical commutation relations,
imposed on the field operators evaluated at a global Cauchy surface. In the
algebraic formulation of linear quantum field theory, the canonical commutation
relations are restated in terms of a well-defined symplectic structure on the
space of smooth solutions, and the local field algebra is constructed as the
Weyl algebra associated to this symplectic vector space. When spacetime is not
globally hyperbolic, e.g. when it contains naked singularities or closed
timelike curves, a global Cauchy surface does not exist, and there is no
obvious way to formulate the canonical commutation relations, hence no obvious
way to construct the field algebra. In a paper submitted elsewhere, we report
on a generalization of the algebraic framework for quantum field theory to
arbitrary topological spaces which do not necessarily have a spacetime metric
defined on them at the outset. Taking this generalization as a starting point,
in this paper we give a prescription for constructing the field algebra of a
(massless or massive) Klein-Gordon field on an arbitrary background spacetime.
When spacetime is globally hyperbolic, the theory defined by our construction
coincides with the ordinary Klein-Gordon field theory on aComment: 21 pages, UCSBTH-92-4
Support varieties for selfinjective algebras
Support varieties for any finite dimensional algebra over a field were
introduced by Snashall-Solberg using graded subalgebras of the Hochschild
cohomology. We mainly study these varieties for selfinjective algebras under
appropriate finite generation hypotheses. Then many of the standard results
from the theory of support varieties for finite groups generalize to this
situation. In particular, the complexity of the module equals the dimension of
its corresponding variety, all closed homogeneous varieties occur as the
variety of some module, the variety of an indecomposable module is connected,
periodic modules are lines and for symmetric algebras a generalization of
Webb's theorem is true
Gravitational waves about curved backgrounds: a consistency analysis in de Sitter spacetime
Gravitational waves are considered as metric perturbations about a curved
background metric, rather than the flat Minkowski metric since several
situations of physical interest can be discussed by this generalization. In
this case, when the de Donder gauge is imposed, its preservation under
infinitesimal spacetime diffeomorphisms is guaranteed if and only if the
associated covector is ruled by a second-order hyperbolic operator which is the
classical counterpart of the ghost operator in quantum gravity. In such a wave
equation, the Ricci term has opposite sign with respect to the wave equation
for Maxwell theory in the Lorenz gauge. We are, nevertheless, able to relate
the solutions of the two problems, and the algorithm is applied to the case
when the curved background geometry is the de Sitter spacetime. Such vector
wave equations are studied in two different ways: i) an integral
representation, ii) through a solution by factorization of the hyperbolic
equation. The latter method is extended to the wave equation of metric
perturbations in the de Sitter spacetime. This approach is a step towards a
general discussion of gravitational waves in the de Sitter spacetime and might
assume relevance in cosmology in order to study the stochastic background
emerging from inflation.Comment: 17 pages. Misprints amended in Eqs. 50, 54, 55, 75, 7
- …