Thermal Radiation from Nucleons and Mesons

Thermal photon emission rates due to meson-nucleon interactions have been evaluated. An exhaustive set of reactions involving p(\bar p), n(\bar n), rho, omega, a_1, pi and eta is seen to provide a sizeable contribution to the emission rate from hot hadronic matter. Contributions from baryonic resonances are found to be negligibly small

Portability of tag SNPs across isolated population groups: an example from India

Isolated population groups are useful in conducting association studies of complex diseases to avoid various pitfalls, including those arising from population stratification. Since DNA resequencing is expensive, it is recommended that genotyping be carried out at tagSNP (tSNP) loci. For this, tSNPs identified in one isolated population need to be used in another. Unless tSNPs are highly portable across populations this strategy may result in loss of information in association studies. We examined the issue of tSNP portability by sampling individuals from 10 isolated ethnic groups from India. We generated DNA resequencing data pertaining to 3 genomic regions and identified tSNPs in each population. We defined an index of tSNP portability and showed that portability is low across isolated Indian ethnic groups. The extent of portability did not significantly correlate with genetic similarity among the populations studied here. We also analyzed our data with sequence data from individuals of African and European descent. Our results indicated that it may be necessary to carry out resequencing in a small number of individuals to discover SNPs and identify tSNPs in the specific isolated population in which a disease association study is to be conducted

Flavour equilibration in quark-gluon plasma

Within the framework of a dynamical and physically transparent model developed earlier, we study the time evolution of various quark flavours in the baryon-free region in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions. We show that even under optimistic conditions, the quark-gluon system fails to achieve chemical equilibrium