Giant Magnons and Spiky Strings on S^3 with B-field

We study solutions for a rotating string on S^3 with a background NS-NS B-field and show the existence of spiky string and giant magnon as two limiting solutions. We make a connection to the sine-Gordon model via the Polyakov worldsheet action and study the effect of B-field. In particular, we find the magnon solution can be mapped to the excitation of a fractional spin chain. We conjecture a B-deformed SYM to be the gauge theory dual to this background.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures, more references adde

XRCC1, but not APE1 and hOGG1 gene polymorphisms is a risk factor for pterygium.

PurposeEpidemiological evidence suggests that UV irradiation plays an important role in pterygium pathogenesis. UV irradiation can produce a wide range of DNA damage. The base excision repair (BER) pathway is considered the most important pathway involved in the repair of radiation-induced DNA damage. Based on previous studies, single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 8-oxoguanine glycosylase-1 (OGG1), X-ray repair cross-complementing-1 (XRCC1), and AP-endonuclease-1 (APE1) genes in the BER pathway have been found to affect the individual sensitivity to radiation exposure and induction of DNA damage. Therefore, we hypothesize that the genetic polymorphisms of these repair genes increase the risk of pterygium.MethodsXRCC1, APE1, and hOGG1 polymorphisms were studied using fluorescence-labeled Taq Man probes on 83 pterygial specimens and 206 normal controls.ResultsThere was a significant difference between the case and control groups in the XRCC1 genotype (p=0.038) but not in hOGG1 (p=0.383) and APE1 (p=0.898). The odds ratio of the XRCC1 A/G polymorphism was 2.592 (95% CI=1.225-5.484, p=0.013) and the G/G polymorphism was 1.212 (95% CI=0.914-1.607), compared to the A/A wild-type genotype. Moreover, individuals who carried at least one C-allele (A/G and G/G) had a 1.710 fold increased risk of developing pterygium compared to those who carried the A/A wild type genotype (OR=1.710; 95% CI: 1.015-2.882, p=0.044). The hOGG1 and APE1 polymorphisms did not have an increased odds ratio compared with the wild type.ConclusionsXRCC1 (Arg399 Glu) is correlated with pterygium and might become a potential marker for the prediction of pterygium susceptibility

A Bayesian measurement error model for two-channel cell-based RNAi data with replicates

RNA interference (RNAi) is an endogenous cellular process in which small double-stranded RNAs lead to the destruction of mRNAs with complementary nucleoside sequence. With the production of RNAi libraries, large-scale RNAi screening in human cells can be conducted to identify unknown genes involved in a biological pathway. One challenge researchers face is how to deal with the multiple testing issue and the related false positive rate (FDR) and false negative rate (FNR). This paper proposes a Bayesian hierarchical measurement error model for the analysis of data from a two-channel RNAi high-throughput experiment with replicates, in which both the activity of a particular biological pathway and cell viability are monitored and the goal is to identify short hair-pin RNAs (shRNAs) that affect the pathway activity without affecting cell activity. Simulation studies demonstrate the flexibility and robustness of the Bayesian method and the benefits of having replicates in the experiment. This method is illustrated through analyzing the data from a RNAi high-throughput screening that searches for cellular factors affecting HCV replication without affecting cell viability; comparisons of the results from this HCV study and some of those reported in the literature are included.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOAS496 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

An Extended Analytic Solution of Combined Refraction and Diffraction of Long Waves Propagating over Circular Island

An analytic solution of long waves scattering by a cylindrical island mounted on a permeable circular shoal was obtained by solving the linear long wave equation (LWE). The solution is in terms of the Bessel function expressed by complex variables. The present solution is suitable for arbitrary bottom configurations described by a power function with two independent parameters. For the case of the paraboloidal shoal, there exists a singular point (α=2) which can be removed using Frobenius series, where α is a real constant. The present solution is reduced to Yu and Zhang’s (2003) solution for impermeable circular shoal. The numerical results show some special features of the combined effect of wave refraction and diffraction caused by a porous circular island. The effect of key parameters of the island dimension, the shoal slope, and permeability on wave scattering was discussed based on the analytic solution

Association between copy number variation of complement component C4 and Graves' disease

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Gene copy number of complement component <it>C4</it>, which varies among individuals, may determine the intrinsic strength of the classical complement pathway. Presuming a major role of complement as an effecter in peptide-mediated inflammation and phagocytosis, we hypothesized that <it>C4 </it>genetic diversity may partially explain the development of Graves' disease (GD) and the variation in its outcomes.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A case-control study including 624 patients with GD and 160 healthy individuals were enrolled. CNV of <it>C4 </it>isotypes (<it>C4A </it>and <it>C4B</it>) genes were performed by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction analysis. Statistical comparison and identification of CNV of total <it>C4, C4 </it>isotypes (<it>C4A </it>and <it>C4B</it>) and <it>C4 </it>polymorphisms were estimated according to the occurrence of GD and its associated clinical features.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Individuals with 4, 2, and 2 copies of <it>C4</it>, <it>C4A </it>and <it>C4B </it>genes, especially those with A2B2 polymorphism may associate with the development of GD (p = 0.001, OR = 10.994, 95% CI: 6.277-19.255; p = 0.008, OR = 1.732, 95% CI: 1.190-2.520; p = 2.420 × 10-5, OR = 2.621, 95% CI: 1.791-3.835; and <it>p </it>= 1.395 × 10^-4, OR = 2.671, 95% CI: 1.761-4.052, respectively). Although the distribution of copy number for total <it>C4</it>, <it>C4 </it>isotypes as well as <it>C4 </it>polymorphisms did not associate with the occurrence of goiter, nodular hyperplasia, GO and myxedema, <2 copies of <it>C4A </it>may associate with high risk toward vitiligo in patients with GD (<it>p </it>= 0.001, OR = 5.579, 95% CI: 1.659-18.763).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These results may be further estimated for its clinical application on GD and the vitiligo in patients with GD.</p

BANet: Blur-aware Attention Networks for Dynamic Scene Deblurring

Image motion blur usually results from moving objects or camera shakes. Such blur is generally directional and non-uniform. Previous research efforts attempt to solve non-uniform blur by using self-recurrent multi-scale or multi-patch architectures accompanying with self-attention. However, using self-recurrent frameworks typically leads to a longer inference time, while inter-pixel or inter-channel self-attention may cause excessive memory usage. This paper proposes blur-aware attention networks (BANet) that accomplish accurate and efficient deblurring via a single forward pass. Our BANet utilizes region-based self-attention with multi-kernel strip pooling to disentangle blur patterns of different degrees and with cascaded parallel dilated convolution to aggregate multi-scale content features. Extensive experimental results on the GoPro and HIDE benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed BANet performs favorably against the state-of-the-art in blurred image restoration and can provide deblurred results in real-time