Energy Dependence of Direct-Quarkonium Production in pp Collisions from Fixed-Target to LHC Energies: Complete One-Loop Analysis

We compute the energy dependence of the P_T-integrated cross section of directly produced quarkonia in pp collisions at next-to-leading order (NLO), namely up to alpha_s^3, within nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD). Our analysis is based on the idea that the P_T-integrated and the P_T-differential cross sections can be treated as two different observables. The colour-octet NRQCD parameters needed to predict the P_T-integrated yield can thus be extracted from the fits of the P_T-differential cross sections at mid and large P_T. For the first time, the total cross section is evaluated in NRQCD at full NLO accuracy using the recent NLO fits of the P_T-differential yields at RHIC, the Tevatron and the LHC. Both the normalisation and the energy dependence of the J/psi, psi' and Upsilon(1S), we obtained, are in disagreement with the data irrespective of the fit method. The same is true if one uses CEM-like colour-octet NRQCD parameters. If, on the contrary, one disregards the colour-octet contribution, the existing data in the TeV range are well described by the alpha_s^3 contribution in the colour-singlet model --which, at alpha_s^4, however shows an unphysical energy dependence. A similar observation is made for eta(c,b). This calls for a full NNLO or for a resummation of the initial-state radiation in this channel. In any case, past claims that colour-octet transitions are dominantly responsible for low-P_T quarkonium production are not supported by our results. This may impact the interpretation of quarkonium suppression in high-energy proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions.Comment: 15 pages, 22 Figures, LaTeX uses svepjc3.clo, svglov3.clo, svjour3.cls (included

Pharmacokinetic/Pharmacodynamic Correlation of Cefquinome Against Experimental Catheter-Associated Biofilm Infection Due to Staphylococcus aureus.

Biofilm formations play an important role in Staphylococcus aureus pathogenesis and contribute to antibiotic treatment failures in biofilm-associated infections. The aim of this study was to evaluate the pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) profiles of cefquinome against an experimental catheter-related biofilm model due to S. aureus, including three clinical isolates and one non-clinical isolate. The minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC), minimal biofilm inhibitory concentration (MBIC), biofilm bactericidal concentration (BBC), minimal biofilm eradication concentration (MBEC) and biofilm prevention concentration (BPC) and in vitro time-kill curves of cefquinome were studied in both planktonic and biofilm cells of study S. aureus strains. The in vivo post-antibiotic effects (PAEs), PK profiles and efficacy of cefquinome were performed in the catheter-related biofilm infection model in murine. A sigmoid E max model was utilized to determine the PK/PD index that best described the dose-response profiles in the model. The MICs and MBICs of cefquinome for the four S. aureus strains were 0.5 and 16 μg/mL, respectively. The BBCs (32-64 μg/mL) and MBECs (64-256 μg/mL) of these study strains were much higher than their corresponding BPC values (1-2 μg/mL). Cefquinome showed time-dependent killing both on planktonic and biofilm cells, but produced much shorter PAEs in biofilm infections. The best-correlated PK/PD parameters of cefquinome for planktonic and biofilm cells were the duration of time that the free drug level exceeded the MIC (fT > MIC, R (2) = 96.2%) and the MBIC (fT > MBIC, R (2) = 94.7%), respectively. In addition, the AUC24h/MBIC of cefquinome also significantly correlated with the anti-biofilm outcome in this model (R (2) = 93.1%). The values of AUC24h/MBIC for biofilm-static and 1-log10-unit biofilm-cidal activity were 22.8 and 35.6 h; respectively. These results indicate that the PK/PD profiles of cefquinome could be used as valuable guidance for effective dosing regimens treating S. aureus biofilm-related infections

The endoplasmic reticulum may be an Achilles' heel of cancer cells that have undergone an epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition

In a recent report published in Cancer Discovery we identified a novel vulnerability of cancer cells that have undergone an epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) and established that the PERK branch of the unfolded protein response is constitutively activated upon EMT. In this commentary, we summarize and provide context for our findings. Keywords: EMT; ER stress; UPRNational Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 1122374

StereoFlowGAN: Co-training for Stereo and Flow with Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

We introduce a novel training strategy for stereo matching and optical flow estimation that utilizes image-to-image translation between synthetic and real image domains. Our approach enables the training of models that excel in real image scenarios while relying solely on ground-truth information from synthetic images. To facilitate task-agnostic domain adaptation and the training of task-specific components, we introduce a bidirectional feature warping module that handles both left-right and forward-backward directions. Experimental results show competitive performance over previous domain translation-based methods, which substantiate the efficacy of our proposed framework, effectively leveraging the benefits of unsupervised domain adaptation, stereo matching, and optical flow estimation.Comment: Accepted by BMVC 202

Next-to-Leading Order Differential Cross Sections for J

Using nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization, we calculate the yields for J/ψ, ψ(2S), and Υ(1S) hadroproduction at s=72 GeV and 115 GeV including the next-to-leading order QCD corrections. Both these center-of-mass energies correspond to those obtained with 7 TeV and 2.76 TeV nucleon beam impinging a fixed target. We study the cross section integrated in pt as a function of the (center-of-mass) rapidity as well as the pt differential cross section in the central rapidity region. Using different NLO fit results of the NRQCD long-distance matrix elements, we evaluate a theoretical uncertainty which is certainly much larger than the projected experimental uncertainties with the expected 20 fb−1 to be collected per year with AFTER@LHC for pp collision at the center of mass energy s≃115 GeV