9,051 research outputs found
Survey of Human Mitochondrial Diseases Using New Genomic/Proteomic Tools
BACKGROUND. We have constructed Bayesian prior-based, amino-acid sequence profiles for the complete yeast mitochondrial proteome and used them to develop methods for identifying and characterizing the context of protein mutations that give rise to human mitochondrial diseases. (Bayesian priors are conditional probabilities that allow the estimation of the likelihood of an event - such as an amino-acid substitution - on the basis of prior occurrences of similar events.) Because these profiles can assemble sets of taxonomically very diverse homologs, they enable identification of the structurally and/or functionally most critical sites in the proteins on the basis of the degree of sequence conservation. These profiles can also find distant homologs with determined three-dimensional structures that aid in the interpretation of effects of missense mutations. RESULTS. This survey reports such an analysis for 15 missense mutations one insertion and three deletions involved in Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy, Leigh syndrome, mitochondrial neurogastrointestinal encephalomyopathy, Mohr-Tranebjaerg syndrome, iron-storage disorders related to Friedreich's ataxia, and hereditary spastic paraplegia. We present structural correlations for seven of the mutations. CONCLUSIONS. Of the 19 mutations analyzed, 14 involved changes in very highly conserved parts of the affected proteins. Five out of seven structural correlations provided reasonable explanations for the malfunctions. As additional genetic and structural data become available, this methodology can be extended. It has the potential for assisting in identifying new disease-related genes. Furthermore, profiles with structural homologs can generate mechanistic hypotheses concerning the underlying biochemical processes - and why they break down as a result of the mutations.United States Department of Energy (DE-FG02-98ER62558); National Science Foundation (DBI-9807993
Trying to define Free Will : a cognitive and fonctional model proposal
The debate about Free Will has been in the human mind for centuries, but has become even more intense with the recent scientific findings adding new lights on the problem. This interdisciplinary explosion of interest for the topic has brought many insightful knowledge, but also a great deal of epistemological problems. We think that those epistemological problems are deeply related to the very definition of Free Will and how this definition interacts with the interpretations of experimental results.
We will thus outline a few of these problems and then propose a definition of Free Will which takes into account those epistemological pitfalls
QED self-energy contribution to highly-excited atomic states
We present numerical values for the self-energy shifts predicted by QED
(Quantum Electrodynamics) for hydrogenlike ions (nuclear charge ) with an electron in an , 4 or 5 level with high angular momentum
(). Applications include predictions of precision transition
energies and studies of the outer-shell structure of atoms and ions.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure
Lamb Shift of 3P and 4P states and the determination of
The fine structure interval of P states in hydrogenlike systems can be
determined theoretically with high precision, because the energy levels of P
states are only slightly influenced by the structure of the nucleus. Therefore
a measurement of the fine structure may serve as an excellent test of QED in
bound systems or alternatively as a means of determining the fine structure
constant with very high precision. In this paper an improved analytic
calculation of higher-order binding corrections to the one-loop self energy of
3P and 4P states in hydrogen-like systems with low nuclear charge number is
presented. A comparison of the analytic results to the extrapolated numerical
data for high ions serves as an independent test of the analytic
evaluation. New theoretical values for the Lamb shift of the P states and for
the fine structure splittings are given.Comment: 33 pages, LaTeX, 4 tables, 4 figure
Benchmark on neutron capture extracted from reactions
Direct neutron capture reactions play an important role in nuclear
astrophysics and applied physics. Since for most unstable short-lived nuclei it
is not possible to measure the cross sections, reactions
have been used as an alternative indirect tool. We analyze simultaneously
at deuteron energies and 56 MeV
and the thermal reaction at 25 meV. We include results for the
ground state and the first excited state of Ca. From the low-energy
reaction, the neutron asymptotic normalization coefficient (ANC) is
determined. Using this ANC, we extract the spectroscopic factor (SF) from the
higher energy data and the data. The SF obtained through
the 56 MeV data are less accurate but consistent with those from the
thermal capture. We show that to have a similar dependence on the single
particle parameters as in the , the (d,p) reaction should be
measured at 30 MeV.Comment: 5 pg, 4 figs, Phys. Rev. C (rapid) in pres
Dust absorption and scattering in the silicon K-edge
The composition and properties of interstellar silicate dust are not well
understood. In X-rays, interstellar dust can be studied in detail by making use
of the fine structure features in the Si K-edge. The features in the Si K-edge
offer a range of possibilities to study silicon-bearing dust, such as
investigating the crystallinity, abundance, and the chemical composition along
a given line of sight. We present newly acquired laboratory measurements of the
silicon K-edge of several silicate-compounds that complement our measurements
from our earlier pilot study. The resulting dust extinction profiles serve as
templates for the interstellar extinction that we observe. The extinction
profiles were used to model the interstellar dust in the dense environments of
the Galaxy. The laboratory measurements, taken at the Soleil synchrotron
facility in Paris, were adapted for astrophysical data analysis and implemented
in the SPEX spectral fitting program. The models were used to fit the spectra
of nine low-mass X-ray binaries located in the Galactic center neighborhood in
order to determine the dust properties along those lines of sight. Most lines
of sight can be fit well by amorphous olivine. We also established upper limits
on the amount of crystalline material that the modeling allows. We obtained
values of the total silicon abundance, silicon dust abundance, and depletion
along each of the sightlines. We find a possible gradient of
dex/kpc for the total silicon abundance versus the Galactocentric distance. We
do not find a relation between the depletion and the extinction along the line
of sight.Comment: 18 pages, 16 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy and
Astrophysic
Outer Regions of the Cluster Gaseous Atmospheres
We present a systematic study of the hot gas distribution in the outer
regions of regular clusters using ROSAT PSPC data. Outside the cooling flow
region, the beta-model describes the observed surface brightness closely, but
not precisely. Between 0.3 and 1 virial radii, the profiles are characterized
by a power law with slope, expressed in terms of the beta parameter, in the
range beta=0.65 to 0.85. The values of beta in this range of radii are
typically larger by ~0.05 than those derived from the global fit. There is a
mild trend for the slope to increase with temperature, from ~0.68 for 3
keV clusters to ~0.8 for 10 keV clusters; however, even at high temperatures
there are clusters with flat gas profiles, 0.7. Our values of beta at large
radius are systematically higher, and the trend of beta with temperature is
weaker than was previously found; the most likely explanation is that earlier
studies were affected by an incomplete exclusion of the central cooling flow
regions. For our regular clusters, the gas distribution at large radii is quite
close to spherically symmetric and this is shown not to be an artifact of the
sample selection. The gas density profiles are very similar when compared in
the units of cluster virial radius. The radius of fixed mean gas overdensity
1000 (corresponding to the dark matter overdensity 200 for Omega=0.2) shows a
tight correlation with temperature, R~T**0.5, as expected from the virial
theorem for clusters with the universal gas fraction. At a given temperature,
the rms scatter of the gas overdensity radius is only ~7% which translates into
a 20% scatter of the gas mass fraction, including statistical scatter due to
measurement uncertainties.Comment: ApJ in press, submitted 11/30/9
Analogies between the crossing number and the tangle crossing number
Tanglegrams are special graphs that consist of a pair of rooted binary trees
with the same number of leaves, and a perfect matching between the two
leaf-sets. These objects are of use in phylogenetics and are represented with
straightline drawings where the leaves of the two plane binary trees are on two
parallel lines and only the matching edges can cross. The tangle crossing
number of a tanglegram is the minimum crossing number over all such drawings
and is related to biologically relevant quantities, such as the number of times
a parasite switched hosts.
Our main results for tanglegrams which parallel known theorems for crossing
numbers are as follows. The removal of a single matching edge in a tanglegram
with leaves decreases the tangle crossing number by at most , and this
is sharp. Additionally, if is the maximum tangle crossing number of
a tanglegram with leaves, we prove
. Further,
we provide an algorithm for computing non-trivial lower bounds on the tangle
crossing number in time. This lower bound may be tight, even for
tanglegrams with tangle crossing number .Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure
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