Impact of membrane bistability on dynamical response of neuronal populations

Neurons in many brain areas can develop pronounced depolarized state of membrane potential (up state) in addition to the normal hyperpolarized down state near the resting potential. The influence of the up state on signal encoding, however, is not well investigated. Here we construct a one-dimensional bistable neuron model and calculate the linear response to noisy oscillatory inputs analytically. We find that with the appearance of an up state, the transmission function is enhanced by the emergence of a local maximum at some optimal frequency and the phase lag relative to the input signal is reduced. We characterize the dependence of the enhancement of frequency response on intrinsic dynamics and on the occupancy of the up state

BcB_c to P-Wave Charmonia Transitions in Covariant Light-Front Approach

In the covariant light-front quark model, we investigate the $B_c\to h_c, \chi_{c0,1,2}$ form factors. The form factors are evaluated in space-like kinematic region and are recasted to the physical region by adopting the exponential parametrization. We also study the semileptonic $B_c$ decays and find that branching fractions for the $B_c\to (h_c,\chi_{c0,1,2})l\bar\nu (l=e,\mu)$ decays have the order $10^{-3}$ while branching fractions for $B_c\to (h_c,\chi_{c0,1,2})\tau\bar\nu_\tau$ are suppressed by one order. These predictions will be tested at the forthcoming hadron colliders.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, published in Phys. Rev.

η\eta meson production of high-energy nuclear collisions at NLO

The transverse momentum spectrum of $\eta$ meson in relativistic heavy-ion collisions is studied at the next-to-leading-order (NLO) within the perturbative QCD, where the jet quenching effect in the QGP is incorporated with the effectively medium-modified $\eta$ fragmentation functions using the higher-twist approach. We show that the theoretical simulations could give nice descriptions of PHENIX data on $\eta$ meson in both $\rm p+p$ and central $\rm Au+Au$ collisions at the RHIC, and also provide numerical predictions of $\eta$ spectra in central $\rm Pb+Pb$ collisions with $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76$~TeV at the LHC. The ratios of $\eta/\pi^0$ in $\rm p+p$ and in central $\rm Au+Au$ collisions at $200$~GeV are found to overlap in a wide $p_T$ region, which matches well the measured ratio $\eta / \pi^0$ by PHENIX. We demonstrate that, at the asymptotic region when $p_{T} \rightarrow \infty$ the ratios of $\eta/\pi^{0}$ in both $\rm Au+Au$ and $\rm p+p$ are almost determined only by quark jets fragmentation and thus approach to the one in $e^{+} e^{-}$ scattering; in addition, the almost identical gluon (quark) contribution fractions to $\eta$ and to $\pi$ result in a rather moderate variation of $\eta/\pi^{0}$ distribution at intermediate and high $p_T$ region in $\rm A+A$ relative to that in $\rm p+p$; while a slightly higher $\eta/\pi^{0}$ at small $p_T$ in $\rm Au+Au$ can be observed due to larger suppression of gluon contribution fraction to $\pi^{0}$ as compared to the one to $\eta$. The theoretical prediction for $\eta / \pi^0$ at the LHC has also been presented.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, 2 typos corrected, revision for publicatio

Analytical Solution for the SU(2) Hedgehog Skyrmion and Static Properties of Nucleons

An analytical solution for symmetric Skyrmion was proposed for the SU(2) Skyrme model, which take the form of the hybrid form of a kink-like solution and that given by the instanton method. The static properties of nucleons was then computed within the framework of collective quantization of the Skyrme model, with a good agreement with that given by the exact numeric solution. The comparisons with the previous results as well as the experimental values are also given.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, submited to Phys.Lett.

Clinical Features and Genetic Analysis of 20 Chinese Patients with X-Linked Hyper-IgM Syndrome

X-linked hyper-IgM syndrome (XHIGM) is one type of primary immunodeficiency diseases, resulting from defects in the CD40 ligand/CD40 signaling pathways. We retrospectively analyzed the clinical and molecular features of 20 Chinese patients diagnosed and followed up in hospitals affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine from 1999 to 2013. The median onset age of these patients was 8.5 months (range: 20 days–21 months). Half of them had positive family histories, with a shorter diagnosis lag. The most common symptoms were recurrent sinopulmonary infections (18 patients, 90%), neutropenia (14 patients, 70%), oral ulcer (13 patients, 65%), and protracted diarrhea (13 patients, 65%). Six patients had BCGitis. Six patients received hematopoietic stem cell transplantations and four of them had immune reconstructions and clinical remissions. Eighteen unique mutations in CD40L gene were identified in these 20 patients from 19 unrelated families, with 12 novel mutations. We compared with reported mutation results and used bioinformatics software to predict the effects of mutations on the target protein. These mutations reflected the heterogeneity of CD40L gene and expanded our understanding of XHIGM