Extended Quark Potential Model from Random Phase Approximation

The quark potential model is extended to include the sea quark excitation using the random phase approximation (RPA). The effective quark interaction preserves the important Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) properties -- chiral symmetry and confinement simultaneously. A primary qualitive analysis shows that the $\pi$ meson as a well-known typical Goldstone boson and the other mesons made up of valence $q\bar{q}$ quark pair such as the $\rho$ meson can also be described in this extended quark potential model

Learning-to-Dispatch: Reinforcement Learning Based Flight Planning under Emergency

The effectiveness of resource allocation under emergencies especially hurricane disasters is crucial. However, most researchers focus on emergency resource allocation in a ground transportation system. In this paper, we propose Learning-to- Dispatch (L2D), a reinforcement learning (RL) based air route dispatching system, that aims to add additional flights for hurricane evacuation while minimizing the airspace’s complexity and air traffic controller’s workload. Given a bipartite graph with weights that are learned from the historical flight data using RL in consideration of short- and long-term gains, we formulate the flight dispatch as an online maximum weight matching problem. Different from the conventional order dispatch problem, there is no actual or estimated index that can evaluate how the additional evacuation flights influence the air traffic complexity. Then we propose a multivariate reward function in the learning phase and compare it with other univariate reward designs to show its superior performance. The experiments using the real world dataset for Hurricane Irma demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our proposed schema

RNA-seq liver transcriptome analysis reveals an activated MHC-I pathway and an inhibited MHC-II pathway at the early stage of vaccine immunization in zebrafish

BACKGROUND: Zebrafish (Danio rerio) is a prominent vertebrate model of human development and pathogenic disease and has recently been utilized to study teleost immune responses to infectious agents threatening the aquaculture industry. In this work, to clarify the host immune mechanisms underlying the protective effects of a putative vaccine and improve its immunogenicity in the future efforts, high-throughput RNA sequencing technology was used to investigate the immunization-related gene expression patterns of zebrafish immunized with Edwardsiella tarda live attenuated vaccine. RESULTS: Average reads of 18.13 million and 14.27 million were obtained from livers of zebrafish immunized with phosphate buffered saline (mock) and E. tarda vaccine (WED), respectively. The reads were annotated with the Ensembl zebrafish database before differential expressed genes sequencing (DESeq) comparative analysis, which identified 4565 significantly differentially expressed genes (2186 up-regulated and 2379 down-regulated in WED; p<0.05). Among those, functional classifications were found in the Gene Ontology database for 3891 and in the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes database for 3467. Several pathways involved in acute phase response, complement activation, immune/defense response, and antigen processing and presentation were remarkably affected at the early stage of WED immunization. Further qPCR analysis confirmed that the genes encoding the factors involved in major histocompatibility complex (MHC)-I processing pathway were up-regulated, while those involved in MHC-II pathway were down-regulated. CONCLUSION: These data provided insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying zebrafish immune response to WED immunization and might aid future studies to develop a highly immunogenic vaccine against gram-negative bacteria in teleosts

Systematic identification of genes involved in divergent skeletal muscle growth rates of broiler and layer chickens

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The genetic closeness and divergent muscle growth rates of broilers and layers make them great models for myogenesis study. In order to discover the molecular mechanisms determining the divergent muscle growth rates and muscle mass control in different chicken lines, we systematically identified differentially expressed genes between broiler and layer skeletal muscle cells during different developmental stages by microarray hybridization experiment.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Taken together, 543 differentially expressed genes were identified between broilers and layers across different developmental stages. We found that differential regulation of slow-type muscle gene expression, satellite cell proliferation and differentiation, protein degradation rate and genes in some metabolic pathways could give great contributions to the divergent muscle growth rates of the two chicken lines. Interestingly, the expression profiles of a few differentially expressed genes were positively or negatively correlated with the growth rates of broilers and layers, indicating that those genes may function in regulating muscle growth during development.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The multiple muscle cell growth regulatory processes identified by our study implied that complicated molecular networks involved in the regulation of chicken muscle growth. These findings will not only offer genetic information for identifying candidate genes for chicken breeding, but also provide new clues for deciphering mechanisms underlining muscle development in vertebrates.</p

Identification and functional characterization of EseH, a new effector of the type III secretion system of Edwardsiella piscicida

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135199/1/cmi12638_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135199/2/cmi12638.pd