WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT HOG CHOLERA

I. WHAT IS HOG CHOLERA? Hog cholera is a deadly, contagious disease that attacks swine only. The disease is caused by hog cholera virus, an agent so small (1/250,000 of an inch) that it can even pass through a fine porcelain filter. How do hogs act when they get the disease? They lie around hiding in their nest, have high fevers, are extremely weak and sick all over. They have little appetite, and often stand in a thinking attitude-motionless, tail relaxed, ears hanging limp, and the head slightly lowered as if in deep thought. Very few hogs ever recover. II. How IMPORTANT Is HOG CHOLERA? Hog cholera is the most important disease of hogs in the United States today. Farmers lose millions of dollars worth of hogs from cholera each year. And the expense of annually vaccinating millions of hogs costs even more. Many foreign markets are closed to pork from the United States because of the fear of importing hog cholera. The disease is important enough so that both state and federal governments have enacted regulatory measures and classed it as a reportable disease. In addition, the United States Congress has authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to enter into a marketing agreement with the hog cholera serum-virus industry. The original act was intended to provide that there should always be enough anti-hog cholera serum on hand to safeguard against sudden widespread outbreaks of the disease. Nevertheless, stocks of antiserum are being reduced every year

DivIVA controls progeny morphology and diverse ParA proteins regulate cell division or gliding motility in Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus

The predatory bacterium B. bacteriovorus grows and divides inside the periplasm of Gram-negative bacteria, forming a structure known as a bdelloplast. Cell division of predators inside the dead prey cell is not by binary fission but instead by synchronous division of a single elongated filamentous cell into odd or even numbers of progeny cells. Bdellovibrio replication and cell division processes are dependent on the finite level of nutrients available from inside the prey bacterium. The filamentous growth and division process of the predator maximizes the number of progeny produced by the finite nutrients in a way that binary fission could not. To learn more about such an unusual growth profile, we studied the role of DivIVA in the growing Bdellovibrio cell. This protein is well known for its link to polar cell growth and spore formation in Gram-positive bacteria, but little is known about its function in a predatory growth context. We show that DivIVA is expressed in the growing B. bacteriovorus cell and controls cell morphology during filamentous cell division, but not the number of progeny produced. Bacterial Two Hybrid (BTH) analysis shows DivIVA may interact with proteins that respond to metabolic indicators of amino-acid biosynthesis or changes in redox state. Such changes may be relevant signals to the predator, indicating the consumption of prey nutrients within the sealed bdelloplast environment. ParA, a chromosome segregation protein, also contributes to bacterial septation in many species. The B. bacteriovorus genome contains three ParA homologs; we identify a canonical ParAB pair required for predatory cell division and show a BTH interaction between a gene product encoded from the same operon as DivIVA with the canonical ParA. The remaining ParA proteins are both expressed in Bdellovibrio but are not required for predator cell division. Instead, one of these ParA proteins coordinates gliding motility, changing the frequency at which the cells reverse direction. Our work will prime further studies into how one bacterium can co-ordinate its cell division with the destruction of another bacterium that it dwells within

Surface state engineering of molecule-molecule interactions

Engineering the electronic structure of organics through interface manipulation, particularly the interface dipole and the barriers to charge carrier injection, is of essential importance to improved organic devices. This requires the meticulous fabrication of desired organic structures by precisely controlling the interactions between molecules. The well-known principles of organic coordination chemistry cannot be applied without proper consideration of extra molecular hybridization, charge transer and dipole formation at the interfaces. Here we identify the interplay between energy level alignment, charge transfer, surface dipole and charge pillow effect and show how these effects collectively determine the net force between adsorbed porphyrin 2H-TPP on Cu(111). We show that the forces between supported porphyrins can be altered by controlling the amount of charge transferred across the interface accurately through the relative alignment of molecular electronic levels with respect to the Shockley surface state of the metal substrate, and hence govern the self-assembly of the molecules

Does the Red Queen reign in the kingdom of digital organisms?

In competition experiments between two RNA viruses of equal or almost equal fitness, often both strains gain in fitness before one eventually excludes the other. This observation has been linked to the Red Queen effect, which describes a situation in which organisms have to constantly adapt just to keep their status quo. I carried out experiments with digital organisms (self-replicating computer programs) in order to clarify how the competing strains' location in fitness space influences the Red-Queen effect. I found that gains in fitness during competition were prevalent for organisms that were taken from the base of a fitness peak, but absent or rare for organisms that were taken from the top of a peak or from a considerable distance away from the nearest peak. In the latter two cases, either neutral drift and loss of the fittest mutants or the waiting time to the first beneficial mutation were more important factors. Moreover, I found that the Red-Queen dynamic in general led to faster exclusion than the other two mechanisms.Comment: 10 pages, 5 eps figure

Borcherds symmetries in M-theory

It is well known but rather mysterious that root spaces of the $E_k$ Lie groups appear in the second integral cohomology of regular, complex, compact, del Pezzo surfaces. The corresponding groups act on the scalar fields (0-forms) of toroidal compactifications of M theory. Their Borel subgroups are actually subgroups of supergroups of finite dimension over the Grassmann algebra of differential forms on spacetime that have been shown to preserve the self-duality equation obeyed by all bosonic form-fields of the theory. We show here that the corresponding duality superalgebras are nothing but Borcherds superalgebras truncated by the above choice of Grassmann coefficients. The full Borcherds' root lattices are the second integral cohomology of the del Pezzo surfaces. Our choice of simple roots uses the anti-canonical form and its known orthogonal complement. Another result is the determination of del Pezzo surfaces associated to other string and field theory models. Dimensional reduction on $T^k$ corresponds to blow-up of $k$ points in general position with respect to each other. All theories of the Magic triangle that reduce to the $E_n$ sigma model in three dimensions correspond to singular del Pezzo surfaces with $A_{8-n}$ (normal) singularity at a point. The case of type I and heterotic theories if one drops their gauge sector corresponds to non-normal (singular along a curve) del Pezzo's. We comment on previous encounters with Borcherds algebras at the end of the paper.Comment: 30 pages. Besides expository improvements, we exclude by hand real fermionic simple roots when they would naively aris

Counting BPS states on the Enriques Calabi-Yau

We study topological string amplitudes for the FHSV model using various techniques. This model has a type II realization involving a Calabi-Yau threefold with Enriques fibres, which we call the Enriques Calabi-Yau. By applying heterotic/type IIA duality, we compute the topological amplitudes in the fibre to all genera. It turns out that there are two different ways to do the computation that lead to topological couplings with different BPS content. One of them leads to the standard D0-D2 counting amplitudes, and from the other one we obtain information about bound states of D0-D4-D2 branes on the Enriques fibre. We also study the model using mirror symmetry and the holomorphic anomaly equations. We verify in this way the heterotic results for the D0-D2 generating functional for low genera and find closed expressions for the topological amplitudes on the total space in terms of modular forms, and up to genus four. This model turns out to be much simpler than the generic B-model and might be exactly solvable.Comment: 62 pages, v3: some results at genus 3 corrected, more typos correcte

Entire solutions of hydrodynamical equations with exponential dissipation

We consider a modification of the three-dimensional Navier--Stokes equations and other hydrodynamical evolution equations with space-periodic initial conditions in which the usual Laplacian of the dissipation operator is replaced by an operator whose Fourier symbol grows exponentially as \ue ^{|k|/\kd} at high wavenumbers $|k|$. Using estimates in suitable classes of analytic functions, we show that the solutions with initially finite energy become immediately entire in the space variables and that the Fourier coefficients decay faster than \ue ^{-C(k/\kd) \ln (|k|/\kd)} for any $C<1/(2\ln 2)$. The same result holds for the one-dimensional Burgers equation with exponential dissipation but can be improved: heuristic arguments and very precise simulations, analyzed by the method of asymptotic extrapolation of van der Hoeven, indicate that the leading-order asymptotics is precisely of the above form with $C= C_\star =1/\ln2$. The same behavior with a universal constant $C_\star$ is conjectured for the Navier--Stokes equations with exponential dissipation in any space dimension. This universality prevents the strong growth of intermittency in the far dissipation range which is obtained for ordinary Navier--Stokes turbulence. Possible applications to improved spectral simulations are briefly discussed.Comment: 29 pages, 3 figures, Comm. Math. Phys., in pres

Steiner t-designs for large t

One of the most central and long-standing open questions in combinatorial design theory concerns the existence of Steiner t-designs for large values of t. Although in his classical 1987 paper, L. Teirlinck has shown that non-trivial t-designs exist for all values of t, no non-trivial Steiner t-design with t > 5 has been constructed until now. Understandingly, the case t = 6 has received considerable attention. There has been recent progress concerning the existence of highly symmetric Steiner 6-designs: It is shown in [M. Huber, J. Algebr. Comb. 26 (2007), pp. 453-476] that no non-trivial flag-transitive Steiner 6-design can exist. In this paper, we announce that essentially also no block-transitive Steiner 6-design can exist.Comment: 9 pages; to appear in: Mathematical Methods in Computer Science 2008, ed. by J.Calmet, W.Geiselmann, J.Mueller-Quade, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Scienc

Bulk Electronic structure of Na0.35_{0.35}CoO2_{2}.1.3H2_{2}O

High-energy (h$\nu$ = 5.95 keV) synchrotron Photoemission spectroscopy (PES) is used to study bulk electronic structure of Na$_{0.35}$CoO$_{2}$.1.3H$_{2}$O, the layered superconductor. In contrast to 3-dimensional doped Co oxides, Co $\it{2p}$ core level spectra show well-separated Co$^{3+}$ and Co$^{4+}$ ions. Cluster calculations suggest low spin Co$^{3+}$ and Co$^{4+}$ character, and a moderate on-site Coulomb correlation energy U$_{dd}\sim$3-5.5 eV. Photon dependent valence band PES identifies Co $\it{3d}$ and O $\it{2p}$ derived states, in near agreement with band structure calculations.Comment: 4 pages 4 figures Revised text added referenc