Sharing data from clinical trials: the rationale for a controlled access approach.

The move towards increased transparency around clinical trials is welcome. Much focus has been on under-reporting of trials and access to individual patient data to allow independent verification of findings. There are many other good reasons for data sharing from clinical trials. We describe some key issues in data sharing, including the challenges of open access to data. These include issues in consent and disclosure; risks in identification, including self-identification; risks in distorting data to prevent self-identification; and risks in analysis. These risks have led us to develop a controlled access policy, which safeguards the rights of patients entered in our trials, guards the intellectual property rights of the original researchers who designed the trial and collected the data, provides a barrier against unnecessary duplication, and ensures that researchers have the necessary resources and skills to analyse the data

Accretion Disks Around Black Holes: Twenty Five Years Later

We study the progress of the theory of accretion disks around black holes in last twenty five years and explain why advective disks are the best bet in explaining varied stationary and non-stationary observations from black hole candidates. We show also that the recently proposed advection dominated flows are incorrect.Comment: 30 Latex pages including figures. Kluwer Style files included. Appearing in `Observational Evidence for Black Holes in the Universe', ed. Sandip K. Chakrabarti, Kluwer Academic Publishers (DORDRECHT: Holland

Precision on leptonic mixing parameters at future neutrino oscillation experiments

We perform a comparison of the different future neutrino oscillation experiments based on the achievable precision in the determination of the fundamental parameters theta_{13} and the CP phase, delta, assuming that theta_{13} is in the range indicated by the recent Daya Bay measurement. We study the non-trivial dependence of the error on delta on its true value. When matter effects are small, the largest error is found at the points where CP violation is maximal, and the smallest at the CP conserving points. The situation is different when matter effects are sizable. As a result of this effect, the comparison of the physics reach of different experiments on the basis of the CP discovery potential, as usually done, can be misleading. We have compared various proposed super-beam, beta-beam and neutrino factory setups on the basis of the relative precision of theta_{13} and the error on delta. Neutrino factories, both high-energy or low-energy, outperform alternative beam technologies. An ultimate precision on theta_{13} below 3% and an error on delta of < 7^{\circ} at 1 sigma (1 d.o.f.) can be obtained at a neutrino factory.Comment: Minor changes, matches version accepted in JHEP. 30 pages, 9 figure

Determination of genetic relatedness among selected rice (Oryza sativa, L.) cultivars using microsatellite markers

For plant improvement programs, genetic variation information among different cultivars is very important. Genetic variation among 26 rice (Oryza sativa, L.) accessions, consisting of 13 Iranian and 13 Malaysian cultivars was investigated using microsatellite markers distributed across the rice genome. All the 21 selected microsatellite primers were successfully amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) of which 20 (95.2%) were found to be polymorphic. A total of 75 alleles were detected at 21 microsatellite loci. The allele frequencies per locus ranged from 1 in RM338 to 5 alleles in RM307, RM161, RM334 and RM271. The mean number of alleles per locus was 3.57. Amongst these microsatellite loci, the largest polymorphism information content (PIC) value was 0.74 in RM 161, while the lowest PIC value was 0.0 in RM 338. Dendrogram was constructed based on dissimilarity values, unweighted pair group with arithmetic average (UPGMA) and it separated all the cultivars into six clusters. All these polymorphisms could be further evaluated for rice marker assisted selection and developed PCR methodology would expedite screening for large numbers of rice required for association studies.Key words: Genetic variation, genetic dissimilarity, polymorphism information content (PIC), polymerase chain reaction (PCR)

Effects of additives on cordycepin production using a Cordyceps militaris mutant induced by ion beam irradiation

To obtain a sustainable mutant of the medicinal mushroom Cordyceps militaris with a higher cordycepin production, high-energy ion beam irradiation was applied in the present study. Upon successful irradiation by a proton beam, 30 classes of 8-azaadenine and 28 classes of 8-azaaguanine resistant mutants were obtained of which 7 classes (A63-7, A63-8, A81-2, A81-6, G63-8, G81-3, G82-4) were selected as initially promising mutants using their antibacterial ability as an index of cordycepin production. Among these mutants, G81-3 had the highest cordycepin production of 6.84 g/l using optimized conditions compared to that of the control of 2.45 g/l (2.79 times higher). In addition, to explore the influences of different additives on the cordycepin production using the above mutant in a surface liquid culture, adenosine and glycine were used as additives. In the culture medium under the previously optimized conditions for the said mutant, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 g/l adenosine were separately added. These results revealed the highest cordycepin production of 8.57 g/l when using 6 g/l adenosine was 28.10% higher than that of the control (6.69 g/l). This is a highest report of cordycepin production until now. Similarly, the results of other concentrations also superseded the control. The time course of glucose showed that the glucose consumption for the 4 g/l adenosine was the fastest, while that of 10g/l was the slowest with the longest culture time among all the treatments. For the same purpose,glycine was used with yeast extract in weight percent ratios (yeast extract/glycine) of 40/60, 50/50, 60/40, 70/30, 80/20 and 90/10 under the condition that the total amount of glycine and yeast extract were fixed. Also, the glycine was separately added as 10, 20 and 30 weight percent of yeast extract in the culture medium having the same optimized conditions with a fixed yeast extract concentration. Theseresults showed that the 90/10 ratio had the best cordycepin production of 6.80 g/l that was 12.40% higher versus the control (6.05 g/l). The cordycepin production of the 70/30 and 80/20 weight percentratios were also higher than that of the control, while the others had a lower cordycepin production compared to that of the control; especially the cordycepin production with the 10, 20 and 30 weight percent yeast extracts inversely decreased in accordance with the used glycine concentration. Regarding the time course, the glucose consumption for the 40/60 weight percent ratio of yeast extract was the fastest, while that of the 30 weight percent was the slowest with the longest culture time among all the treatments. These results suggested that both the ion beam irradiation and additives had active influences on the cordycepin production and that adenosine had a much better influence than that of glycine. It was also evident that a higher concentration of both adenosine and glycine negatively affected the cordycepin production

K- absorption in nuclei by two and three nucleons

It will be shown that the peaks in the (Lambda p) and (Lambda d) invariant mass distributions, observed in recent FINUDA experiments and claimed to be signals of deeply bound kaonic states, are naturally explained in terms of K- absorption by two or three nucleons leaving the rest of the original nuclei as spectator. For reactions on heavy nuclei, the subsequent interactions of the particles produced in the primary absorption process with the residual nucleus play an important role. Our analyses leads to the conclusion that at present there is no experimental evidence of deeply bound K- state in nuclei. Although the FINUDA experiments have been done for reasons which are not supported a posteriori, some new physics can be extracted from the data.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures. Talk presented at the International Conference on Exotic Atoms "EXA 2008", Vienna, Austria, September 15-18, 200