Type I interferons in tuberculosis: Foe and occasionally friend

Tuberculosis remains one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide, and, despite its clinical significance, there are still significant gaps in our understanding of pathogenic and protective mechanisms triggered by Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection. Type I interferons (IFN) regulate a broad family of genes that either stimulate or inhibit immune function, having both host-protective and detrimental effects, and exhibit well-characterized antiviral activity. Transcriptional studies have uncovered a potential deleterious role for type I IFN in active tuberculosis. Since then, additional studies in human tuberculosis and experimental mouse models of M. tuberculosis infection support the concept that type I IFN promotes both bacterial expansion and disease pathogenesis. More recently, studies in a different setting have suggested a putative protective role for type I IFN. In this study, we discuss the mechanistic and contextual factors that determine the detrimental versus beneficial outcomes of type I IFN induction during M. tuberculosis infection, from human disease to experimental mouse models of tuberculosis

Derivation of an Abelian effective model for instanton chains in 3D Yang-Mills theory

In this work, we derive a recently proposed Abelian model to describe the interaction of correlated monopoles, center vortices, and dual fields in three dimensional SU(2) Yang-Mills theory. Following recent polymer techniques, special care is taken to obtain the end-to-end probability for a single interacting center vortex, which constitutes a key ingredient to represent the ensemble integration.Comment: 18 pages, LaTe

G\"odel-type Spacetimes in Induced Matter Gravity Theory

A five-dimensional (5D) generalized G\"odel-type manifolds are examined in the light of the equivalence problem techniques, as formulated by Cartan. The necessary and sufficient conditions for local homogeneity of these 5D manifolds are derived. The local equivalence of these homogeneous Riemannian manifolds is studied. It is found that they are characterized by three essential parameters $k$, $m^2$ and $\omega$: identical triads $(k, m^2, \omega)$ correspond to locally equivalent 5D manifolds. An irreducible set of isometrically nonequivalent 5D locally homogeneous Riemannian generalized G\"odel-type metrics are exhibited. A classification of these manifolds based on the essential parameters is presented, and the Killing vector fields as well as the corresponding Lie algebra of each class are determined. It is shown that the generalized G\"odel-type 5D manifolds admit maximal group of isometry $G_r$ with $r=7$, $r=9$ or $r=15$ depending on the essential parameters $k$, $m^2$ and $\omega$. The breakdown of causality in all these classes of homogeneous G\"odel-type manifolds are also examined. It is found that in three out of the six irreducible classes the causality can be violated. The unique generalized G\"odel-type solution of the induced matter (IM) field equations is found. The question as to whether the induced matter version of general relativity is an effective therapy for these type of causal anomalies of general relativity is also discussed in connection with a recent article by Romero, Tavakol and Zalaletdinov.Comment: 19 pages, Latex, no figures. To Appear in J.Math.Phys.(1999