Foundations of self-consistent particle-rotor models and of self-consistent cranking models

The Kerman-Klein formulation of the equations of motion for a nuclear shell model and its associated variational principle are reviewed briefly. It is then applied to the derivation of the self-consistent particle-rotor model and of the self-consistent cranking model, for both axially symmetric and triaxial nuclei. Two derivations of the particle-rotor model are given. One of these is of a form that lends itself to an expansion of the result in powers of the ratio of single-particle angular momentum to collective angular momentum, that is essentual to reach the cranking limit. The derivation also requires a distinct, angular-momentum violating, step. The structure of the result implies the possibility of tilted-axis cranking for the axial case and full three-dimensional cranking for the triaxial one. The final equations remain number conserving. In an appendix, the Kerman-Klein method is developed in more detail, and the outlines of several algorithms for obtaining solutions of the associated non-linear formalism are suggested.Comment: 29 page

Lactate signalling regulates fungal β-glucan masking and immune evasion

AJPB: This work was supported by the European Research Council (STRIFE, ERC- 2009-AdG-249793), The UK Medical Research Council (MR/M026663/1), the UK Biotechnology and Biological Research Council (BB/K017365/1), the Wellcome Trust (080088; 097377). ERB: This work was supported by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Research Council (BB/M014525/1). GMA: Supported by the CNPq-Brazil (Science without Borders fellowship 202976/2014-9). GDB: Wellcome Trust (102705). CAM: This work was supported by the UK Medical Research Council (G0400284). DMM: This work was supported by UK National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC/K000306/1). NARG/JW: Wellcome Trust (086827, 075470,101873) and Wellcome Trust Strategic Award in Medical Mycology and Fungal Immunology (097377). ALL: This work was supported by the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology and the University of Aberdeen (MR/N006364/1).Peer reviewedPostprin

The 'indigenous native peasant' trinity: imagining a plurinational community in Evo Morales's Bolivia

Over the last two decades Latin America has been a laboratory for the implementation of new models of state and citizenship. In Bolivia the (neo)liberal multicultural paradigm dominant in the 1990s has recently been replaced by a plurinational paradigm, which implies a deepening of the decentralization process and the strengthening of rights for traditionally marginalized social sectors. This paper describes the process of construction of a plurinational ‘imagined community’ and, in particular, of one of its core narratives: The ‘indigenous native peasant’. I argue that the negotiation of this collective identity and its inclusion as one of the core ideas in the new constitution is the result of a contingent strategy in response to a highly conflictive scenario, which has not been, however, able to trigger a change in the way people identify themselves. Yet in recent years, social movements’ identities have been shaped by centrifugal forces. These forces should be understood as the result of a process of collective actors’ adaptation to institutional and regulatory reforms and contribute to explaining the increase of new intrasocietal conflicts linked to the redefinition of citizenship and territorial boundaries

A fluoride degradable crosslinker for debond-on-demand polyurethane based crosslinked adhesives

The requirement to consider the whole lifecycle of products including disassembly and recycling has resulted in considerable interest in debond-on-demand adhesives. These smart materials undergo controlled loss of adhesive strength when subject to a specific stimulus. This paper reports the design of a crosslinked polyurethane (PU) adhesive which incorporates a fluoride responsive degradable group. The crosslinked PU (CLP) adhesive showed a 28 % increase in adhesive bonding strengths by lap shear testing (14.6 MPa) when compared to structurally analogous linear PU (LPU) adhesive (11.4 MPa). After 3 h in contact with fluoride ions, the CLP exhibited a 55 % loss in adhesive bonding strength (from 14.6 MPa to 6.7 MPa) as a consequence of selective degradation of covalent bonds at the crosslinking sites. This work introduces a new route to dismantle components adhered with the widely used PU adhesives, facilitating recovery of valuable materials, and dramatically reducing waste

An RNA Transport System in Candida albicans Regulates Hyphal Morphology and Invasive Growth

Localization of specific mRNAs is an important mechanism through which cells achieve polarity and direct asymmetric growth. Based on a framework established in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, we describe a She3-dependent RNA transport system in Candida albicans, a fungal pathogen of humans that grows as both budding (yeast) and filamentous (hyphal and pseudohyphal) forms. We identify a set of 40 mRNAs that are selectively transported to the buds of yeast-form cells and to the tips of hyphae, and we show that many of the genes encoded by these mRNAs contribute to hyphal development, as does the transport system itself. Although the basic system of mRNA transport is conserved between S. cerevisiae and C. albicans, we find that the cargo mRNAs have diverged considerably, implying that specific mRNAs can easily move in and out of transport control over evolutionary timescales. The differences in mRNA cargos likely reflect the distinct selective pressures acting on the two species

Drivers of genetic diversity in secondary metabolic gene clusters within a fungal species

Drivers of genetic diversity in secondary metabolic gene clusters within a fungal speciesFilamentous fungi produce a diverse array of secondary metabolites (SMs) critical for defense, virulence, and communication. The metabolic pathways that produce SMs are found in contiguous gene clusters in fungal genomes, an atypical arrangement for metabolic pathways in other eukaryotes. Comparative studies of filamentous fungal species have shown that SM gene clusters are often either highly divergent or uniquely present in one or a handful of species, hampering efforts to determine the genetic basis and evolutionary drivers of SM gene cluster divergence. Here, we examined SM variation in 66 cosmopolitan strains of a single species, the opportunistic human pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus. Investigation of genome-wide within-species variation revealed 5 general types of variation in SM gene clusters: nonfunctional gene polymorphisms; gene gain and loss polymorphisms; whole cluster gain and loss polymorphisms; allelic polymorphisms, in which different alleles corresponded to distinct, nonhomologous clusters; and location polymorphisms, in which a cluster was found to differ in its genomic location across strains. These polymorphisms affect the function of representative A. fumigatus SM gene clusters, such as those involved in the production of gliotoxin, fumigaclavine, and helvolic acid as well as the function of clusters with undefined products. In addition to enabling the identification of polymorphisms, the detection of which requires extensive genome-wide synteny conservation (e.g., mobile gene clusters and nonhomologous cluster alleles), our approach also implicated multiple underlying genetic drivers, including point mutations, recombination, and genomic deletion and insertion events as well as horizontal gene transfer from distant fungi. Finally, most of the variants that we uncover within A. fumigatus have been previously hypothesized to contribute to SM gene cluster diversity across entire fungal classes and phyla. We suggest that the drivers of genetic diversity operating within a fungal species shown here are sufficient to explain SM cluster macroevolutionary patterns.National Science Foundation (grant number DEB-1442113). Received by AR. U.S. National Library of Medicine training grant (grant number 2T15LM007450). Received by ALL. Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientı´fico e 573 Tecnológico. Northern Portugal Regional Operational Programme (grant number NORTE-01- 0145-FEDER-000013). Received by FR. Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do 572 Estado de São Paulo. Received by GHG. National Institutes of Health (grant number R01 AI065728-01). Received by NPK. National Science Foundation (grant number IOS-1401682). Received by JHW. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The search for translational pain outcomes to refine analgesic development: Where did we come from and where are we going?

Pain measures traditionally used in rodents record mere reflexes evoked by sensory stimuli; the results thus may not fully reflect the human pain phenotype. Alterations in physical and emotional functioning, pain-depressed behaviors and facial pain expressions were recently proposed as additional pain outcomes to provide a more accurate measure of clinical pain in rodents, and hence to potentially enhance analgesic drug development. We aimed to review how preclinical pain assessment has evolved since the development of the tail flick test in 1941, with a particular focus on a critical analysis of some nonstandard pain outcomes, and a consideration of how sex differences may affect the performance of these pain surrogates. We tracked original research articles in Medline for the following periods: 1973-1977, 1983-1987, 1993-1997, 2003-2007, and 2014-2018. We identified 606 research articles about alternative surrogate pain measures, 473 of which were published between 2014 and 2018. This indicates that preclinical pain assessment is moving toward the use of these measures, which may soon become standard procedures in preclinical pain laboratories.FPU grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and SportsSpanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO, grant SAF2016-80540-R)Ramón Areces FoundationJunta de Andalucía (grant CTS 109)Esteve PharmaceuticalsEuropean Regional Development Fund (ERDF