3,118 research outputs found
Expression of EpsteinâBarr VirusâEncoded Small RNA (by the EBER-1 Gene) in Liver Specimens from Transplant Recipients with Post-Transplantation Lymphoproliferative Disease
Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)âassociated post-transplantation lymphoproliferative disease (PTLD) develops in 1 to 10 percent of transplant recipients, in whom it can be treated by a reduction in the level of immunosuppression. We postulated that the tissue expression of the small RNA transcribed by the EBER-1 gene during latent EBV infection would identify patients at risk for PTLD. We studied EBER-1 gene expression in liver specimens obtained from 24 patients 2 days to 22 months before the development of PTLD, using in situ hybridization with an oligonucleotide probe. Control specimens were obtained from 20 recipients of allografts with signs of injury due to organ retrieval, acute graft rejection, or viral hepatitis in whom PTLD had not developed 9 to 71 months after the biopsy. Of the 24 patients with PTLD, 17 (71 percent) had specimens in which 1 to 40 percent of mononuclear cells were positive for the EBER-1 gene. In addition, 10 of these 17 patients (59 percent) had specimens with histopathological changes suggestive of EBV hepatitis. In every case, EBER-1âpositive cells were found within the lymphoproliferative lesions identified at autopsy. Only 2 of the 20 controls (10 percent) had specimens with EBER-1âpositive cells (P<0.001), and such cells were rare. EBER-1 gene expression in liver tissue precedes the occurrence of clinical and histologic PTLD. The possibility of identifying patients at risk by the method we describe here and preventing the occurrence of PTLD by a timely reduction of immunosuppression needs to be addressed by future prospective studies. (N Engl J Med 1992;327:1710â4.), POST-TRANSPLANTATION lymphoproliferative disease (PTLD), either polyclonal or monoclonal, complicates the clinical course of 1 to 10 percent of organ-transplant recipients.123 Immunohistochemical studies have demonstrated that the lymphoid cells within the lesions of PTLD almost invariably contain EpsteinâBarr virus (EBV), primarily in a state of latent infection.4,5 The EBER-1 gene is expressed early during latent EBV infection and codes for a small messenger RNA (mRNA) expressed at up to 107 copies per cell.6 We and others have previously demonstrated the value of the detection of EBER-1 RNA for identifying EBV-infected cells in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissues.7,8 In the current investigation, we used⊠© 1992, Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved
Complete High Temperature Expansions for One-Loop Finite Temperature Effects
We develop exact, simple closed form expressions for partition functions
associated with relativistic bosons and fermions in odd spatial dimensions.
These expressions, valid at high temperature, include the effects of a
non-trivial Polyakov loop and generalize well-known high temperature
expansions. The key technical point is the proof of a set of Bessel function
identities which resum low temperature expansions into high temperature
expansions. The complete expressions for these partition functions can be used
to obtain one-loop finite temperature contributions to effective potentials,
and thus free energies and pressures.Comment: 9 pages, RevTeX, no figures. To be published in Phys. Rev D. v2 has
revised introduction and conclusions, plus a few typographical errors are
corrected; v3 corrects one typ
Rigorous Born Approximation and beyond for the Spin-Boson Model
Within the lowest-order Born approximation, we present an exact calculation
of the time dynamics of the spin-boson model in the ohmic regime. We observe
non-Markovian effects at zero temperature that scale with the system-bath
coupling strength and cause qualitative changes in the evolution of coherence
at intermediate times of order of the oscillation period. These changes could
significantly affect the performance of these systems as qubits. In the biased
case, we find a prompt loss of coherence at these intermediate times, whose
decay rate is set by , where is the coupling strength
to the environment. We also explore the calculation of the next order Born
approximation: we show that, at the expense of very large computational
complexity, interesting physical quantities can be rigorously computed at
fourth order using computer algebra, presented completely in an accompanying
Mathematica file. We compute the corrections to the long time
behavior of the system density matrix; the result is identical to the reduced
density matrix of the equilibrium state to the same order in . All
these calculations indicate precision experimental tests that could confirm or
refute the validity of the spin-boson model in a variety of systems.Comment: Greatly extended version of short paper cond-mat/0304118.
Accompanying Mathematica notebook fop5.nb, available in Source, is an
essential part of this work; it gives full details of the fourth-order Born
calculation summarized in the text. fop5.nb is prepared in arXiv style
(available from Wolfram Research
Return times, recurrence densities and entropy for actions of some discrete amenable groups
Results of Wyner and Ziv and of Ornstein and Weiss show that if one observes
the first k outputs of a finite-valued ergodic process, then the waiting time
until this block appears again is almost surely asymptotic to , where
is the entropy of the process. We examine this phenomenon when the allowed
return times are restricted to some subset of times, and generalize the results
to processes parameterized by other discrete amenable groups.
We also obtain a uniform density version of the waiting time results: For a
process on symbols, within a given realization, the density of the initial
-block within larger -blocks approaches , uniformly in ,
as tends to infinity. Again, similar results hold for processes with other
indexing groups.Comment: To appear in Journal d'Analyse Mathematiqu
Gait Analysis of Teenagers and Young Adults Diagnosed with Autism & Severe Verbal Communication Disorders
Both movement differences and disorders are common within autism spectrum disorders (ASD). These differences have wide and heterogeneous variability among different ages and sub-groups all diagnosed with ASD. Gait was studied in a more homogeneously identified group of nine teenagers and young adults who scored as âsevereâ in both measures of verbal communication and overall rating of Autism on the Childhood Autism Rating Scales (CARS). The ASD individuals were compared to a group of typically developing university undergraduates of similar ages. All participants walked a distance of 6-meters across a GAITRite (GR) electronic walkway for six trials. The ASD and comparison groups differed widely on many spatiotemporal aspects of gait including: step and stride length, foot positioning, cadence, velocity, step time, gait cycle time, swing time, stance time, and single and double support time. Moreover, the two groups differed in the percentage of the total gait cycle in each of these phases. The qualitative rating of âBody Useâ on the CARS also indicated severe levels of unusual body movement for all of the ASD participants. These findings demonstrate that older teens and young adults with âsevereâ forms of Verbal Communication Impairments and Autism differ widely in their gait from typically developing individuals. The differences found in the current investigation are far more pronounced compared to previous findings with younger and/or less severely involved individuals diagnosed with ASD as compared to typically developing controls. As such, these data may be a useful anchor-point in understanding the trajectory of development of gait specifically and motor functions generally.
Two-Legged Hopping in Autism Spectrum Disorders
Sensory processing deficits are common within autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Deficits have a heterogeneous dispersion across the spectrum and multimodal processing tasks are thought to magnify integration difficulties. Two-legged hopping in place in sync with an auditory cue (2.3, 3.0 Hz) was studied in a group of six individuals with expressive language impaired ASD (ELI-ASD) and an age-matched control group. Vertical ground reaction force data were collected and discrete Fourier transforms were utilized to determine dominant hopping cadence. Effective leg stiffness was computed through a mass-spring model representation. The ELI-ASD group were unsuccessful in matching their hopping cadence (2.21 ± 0.30 hops·sâ1, 2.35 ± 0.41 hops·sâ1) to either auditory cue with greater deviations at the 3.0 Hz cue. In contrast, the control group was able to match hopping cadence (2.35 ± 0.06 hops·sâ1, 3.02 ± 0.10 hops·sâ1) to either cue via an adjustment of effective leg stiffness. The ELI-ASD group demonstrated a varied response with an interquartile range (IQR) in excess of 0.5 hops·sâ1 as compared to the control group with an IQR \u3c 0.03 hops·sâ1. Several sensorimotor mechanisms could explain the inability of participants with ELI-ASD to modulate motor output to match an external auditory cue. These results suggest that a multimodal gross motor task can (1) discriminate performance among a group of individuals with severe autism, and (2) could be a useful quantitative tool for evaluating motor performance in individuals with ASD individuals
Medium effects in K^+ nucleus interaction from consistent analysis of integral and differential cross sections
Self consistency in the analysis of transmission measurements for K^+ on
several nuclei in the momentum range of 500-700 MeV/c is achieved with a
"t_{eff}(rho)rho" potential and new results are derived for total cross
sections. The imaginary part of the t_{eff} amplitude is found to increase
linearly with the average nuclear density in excess of a threshold value. This
phenomenological density dependence of the K^+ nucleus optical potential also
gives rise to good agreement with recent measurements of differential cross
sections for elastic scattering of 715 MeV/c K^+ by Li^6 and C.Comment: 11 pages, RevTeX, 2 Postscript figures, submitted Phys. Lett.
Subdiffusion and weak ergodicity breaking in the presence of a reactive boundary
We derive the boundary condition for a subdiffusive particle interacting with
a reactive boundary with finite reaction rate. Molecular crowding conditions,
that are found to cause subdiffusion of larger molecules in biological cells,
are shown to effect long-tailed distributions with identical exponent for both
the unbinding times from the boundary to the bulk and the rebinding times from
the bulk. This causes a weak ergodicity breaking: typically, an individual
particle either stays bound or remains in the bulk for very long times. We
discuss why this may be beneficial for in vivo gene regulation by DNA-binding
proteins, whose typical concentrations are nanomolarComment: 4 pages, 1 figure, REVTeX4, accepted to Phys Rev Lett, some typos
correcte
Frustration of Decoherence in Open Quantum Systems
We study a model of frustration of decoherence in an open quantum system.
Contrary to other dissipative ohmic impurity models, such as the Kondo model or
the dissipative two-level system, the impurity model discussed here never
presents overdamped dynamics even for strong coupling to the environment. We
show that this unusual effect has its origins in the quantum mechanical nature
of the coupling between the quantum impurity and the environment. We study the
problem using analytic and numerical renormalization group methods and obtain
expressions for the frequency and temperature dependence of the impurity
susceptibility in different regimes.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure
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