SCOP, a novel gene product expressed in a circadian manner in rat suprachiasmatic nucleus

AbstractTo elucidate the mechanism of the circadian rhythm, genes differentially expressed during subjective day and night in the rat suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a circadian oscillator in mammals, were surveyed by a differential display method. We isolated a novel gene, scop (SCN circadian oscillatory protein), that was expressed in a circadian manner in the SCN. SCOP protein is predominantly expressed in the brain and has domains including a pleckstrin homology domain, leucine-rich repeats, a protein phosphatase 2C-like domain and a glutamine-rich region. The structural feature of SCOP protein suggests its role in the intracellular signaling in the SCN

Stability of Metastable Vacua in Gauge Mediated SUSY Breaking Models with Ultra Light Gravitino

Recently Murayama and Nomura proposed a simple scheme to construct the gauge mediation models, using metastable supersymmetry breaking vacua. It has a possibility to predict the ultra light gravitino mass m_{3/2} \lesssim 16 eV, while such a light gravitino may destabilize the metastable vacua. We investigate stability of the metastable vacuum of their model. The transition rate from the false vacuum to true ones is evaluated by numerical calculation, including the Coleman-Weinberg potential destabilizing the metastable vacuum. It is found that when the messenger sector is minimal, stability of the metastable vacuum imposes an upperbound on squark mass M_{\tilde q} for the ultra light gravitino as M_{\tilde q} \lesssim 1800 GeV at most. Squarks with this mass may be found in the LHC experiments.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure