Neutron capture experiments with 4π DANCE Calorimeter

In recent years we have performed a series of neutron capture experiments with the DANCE detector array located at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. The radiative decay spectrum from the compound nucleus contains important information about nuclear structure and the reaction mechanism. The primary goals of the measurements are to obtain improved capture cross sections, to determine properties of the photon strength function, to improve neutron level densities and strength functions by determining the spin and parity of the capturing states. We shall present examples of our recent results

Intense innate immune responses and severe metabolic disorders in chicken embryonic visceral tissues caused by infection with highly virulent newcastle disease virus compared to the avirulent virus: A bioinformatics analysis.

The highly virulent Newcastle disease virus (NDV) isolates typically result in severe systemic pathological changes and high mortality in Newcastle disease (ND) illness, whereas avirulent or low-virulence NDV strains can cause subclinical disease with no morbidity and even asymp-tomatic infections in birds. However, understanding the host’s innate immune responses to infection with either a highly virulent strain or an avirulent strain, and how this response may contribute to severe pathological damages and even mortality upon infection with the highly virulent strain, remain limited. Therefore, the differences in epigenetic and pathogenesis mechanisms between the highly virulent and avirulent strains were explored, by transcriptional profiling of chicken embryonic visceral tissues (CEVT), infected with either the highly virulent NA-1 strain or the avirulent vaccine LaSota strain using RNA-seq. In our current paper, severe systemic pathological changes and high mortality were only observed in chicken embryos infected with the highly virulent NA-1 strains, although the propagation of viruses exhibited no differences between NA-1 and LaSota. Furthermore, virulent NA-1 infection caused intense innate immune responses and severe metabolic disorders in chicken EVT at 36 h post-infection (hpi), instead of 24 hpi, based on the bioinformatics analysis results for the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between NA-1 and LaSota groups. Notably, an acute hyperinflammatory response, characterized by upregulated inflammatory cytokines, an uncontrolled host immune defense with dysregulated innate immune response-related signaling pathways, as well as severe metabolic disorders with the reorganization of host–cell metabolism were involved in the host defense response to the CEVT infected with the highly virulent NA-1 strain compared to the avirulent vaccine LaSota strain. Taken together, these results indicate that not only the host’s uncontrolled immune response itself, but also the metabolic disorders with viruses hijacking host cell metabolism, may contribute to the pathogenesis of the highly virulent strain in ovo