Sensitivity of the future e−p\boldsymbol{e^{-}p} collider to the coupling of axion-like particles with vector bosons

Axion-like particles (ALPs) arise naturally in many extensions of the Standard Model (SM). We explore the discovery potential for ALPs of the Large Hadron electron Collider (LHeC) via the $W^{+}W^{-}$ fusion process. For concreteness, both cases of the ALP decaying to muon pairs and $b\overline{b}$ pairs are investigated. Our numerical results show that the LHeC with the center of mass energy of $1.3$ TeV and the integrated luminosity of $1$ ab$^{-1}$ might be more sensitive than the LHC in probing ALPs over a range of masses from a few tens of GeV to $900$ GeV, where the promising sensitivities to the coupling of ALP with $W^{\pm}$ bosons reach nearly $0.15$ TeV$^{-1}$ and $0.32$ TeV$^{-1}$ for the signal processes $e^{-}p\rightarrow\nu_{e}ja(a\rightarrow\mu^{+}\mu^{-})$ and $e^{-}p\rightarrow\nu_{e}ja(a\rightarrow b\overline{b})$, respectively.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure

Cognitive Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks over Nakagami-m Fading Channels

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 61372114, by the National 973 Program of China under Grant 2012CB316005, by the Joint Funds of NSFC-Guangdong under Grant U1035001, and by Beijing Higher Education Young Elite Teacher Project (no. YETP0434)

The charged-current non-standard neutrino interactions at the LHC and HL-LHC

A series of new physics scenarios predict the existence of the extra charged gauge boson $W'$, which can induce the charged-current (CC) non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI). By using the Monte-Carlo (MC) simulation, we discuss the sensitivity and constraints on the CC NSI parameters $\epsilon^{qq'Y}_{\alpha\beta}$ ($\alpha = \beta = e$ or $\mu$) for different $W'$ masses $M_{W'}$ via the process $p p \rightarrow W'\rightarrow \ell\nu$. We find that the interference term plays an important role which was usually neglected in the LHC experiments. We further analyzed the future and high-luminosity (HL) LHC sensitivities to the CC NSI parameters with $\sqrt{s}$ = 14 TeV and $\mathcal{L}$ = $300\;{\rm fb}^{-1}$, $1\;{\rm ab}^{-1}$ and $3\;{\rm ab}^{-1}$.Comment: 22 pages, 38 figures, 4 table

Joint assembly and genetic mapping of the Atlantic horseshoe crab genome reveals ancient whole genome duplication

Horseshoe crabs are marine arthropods with a fossil record extending back approximately 450 million years. They exhibit remarkable morphological stability over their long evolutionary history, retaining a number of ancestral arthropod traits, and are often cited as examples of "living fossils." As arthropods, they belong to the Ecdysozoa}, an ancient super-phylum whose sequenced genomes (including insects and nematodes) have thus far shown more divergence from the ancestral pattern of eumetazoan genome organization than cnidarians, deuterostomes, and lophotrochozoans. However, much of ecdysozoan diversity remains unrepresented in comparative genomic analyses. Here we use a new strategy of combined de novo assembly and genetic mapping to examine the chromosome-scale genome organization of the Atlantic horseshoe crab Limulus polyphemus. We constructed a genetic linkage map of this 2.7 Gbp genome by sequencing the nuclear DNA of 34 wild-collected, full-sibling embryos and their parents at a mean redundancy of 1.1x per sample. The map includes 84,307 sequence markers and 5,775 candidate conserved protein coding genes. Comparison to other metazoan genomes shows that the L. polyphemus genome preserves ancestral bilaterian linkage groups, and that a common ancestor of modern horseshoe crabs underwent one or more ancient whole genome duplications (WGDs) ~ 300 MYA, followed by extensive chromosome fusion

Association of Mitochondrial DNA Polymerase γ Gene <i>POLG1</i> Polymorphisms with Parkinsonism in Chinese Populations

Background: Mitochondrial DNA polymerase gamma (POLG1) mutations were associated with levodopa-responsive Parkinsonism. POLG1 gene contains a number of common nonsynonymous SNPs and intronic regulatory SNPs which may have functional consequences. It is of great interest to discover polymorphisms variants associated with Parkinson's disease (PD), both in isolation and in combination with specific SNPs.Materials and Methods: We conducted a case-control study and genotyped twenty SNPs and poly-Q polymorphisms of POLG1 gene including in 344 Chinese sporadic PD patients and 154 healthy controls. All the polymorphisms of POLG1 we found in this study were sequenced by PCR products with dye terminator methods using an ABI-3100 sequencer. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and linkage disequilibrium (LD) for association between twenty POLG1 SNPs and PD were calculated using the program Haploview.Principal Results: We provided evidence for strong association of four intronic SNPs of the POLG1 gene (new report: c.2070-12T>A and rs2307439: c.2070-64G>A in intron 11, P = 0.00011, OR = 1.727; rs2302084: c.3105-11T>C and rs2246900: c.3105-36A>G in intron 19, P = 0.00031, OR = 1.648) with PD. However, we did not identify any significant association between ten exonic SNPs of POLG1 and PD. Linkage disequilibrium analysis indicated that c.2070-12T>A and c.2070-64G>A could be parsed into one block as Haplotype 1 as well as c.3105-11T>C and c.3105-36A>G in Haplotype 2. In addition, case and control study on association of POLG1 CAG repeat (poly-Q) alleles with PD showed a significant association (P = 0.03, OR = 2.16) of the non-10/11Q variants with PD. Although intronic SNPs associated with PD didn't influence POLG1 mRNA alternative splicing, there was a strong association of c.2070-12T>A and c.2070-64G>A with decreased POLG1 mRNA level and protein levels.Conclusions: Our findings indicate that POLG1 may play a role in the pathogenesis of PD in Chinese populations.</p

Genome-wide investigation reveals high evolutionary rates in annual model plants

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Rates of molecular evolution vary widely among species. While significant deviations from molecular clock have been found in many taxa, effects of life histories on molecular evolution are not fully understood. In plants, annual/perennial life history traits have long been suspected to influence the evolutionary rates at the molecular level. To date, however, the number of genes investigated on this subject is limited and the conclusions are mixed. To evaluate the possible heterogeneity in evolutionary rates between annual and perennial plants at the genomic level, we investigated 85 nuclear housekeeping genes, 10 non-housekeeping families, and 34 chloroplast genes using the genomic data from model plants including <it>Arabidopsis thaliana </it>and <it>Medicago truncatula </it>for annuals and grape (<it>Vitis vinifera</it>) and popular (<it>Populus trichocarpa</it>) for perennials.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>According to the cross-comparisons among the four species, 74-82% of the nuclear genes and 71-97% of the chloroplast genes suggested higher rates of molecular evolution in the two annuals than those in the two perennials. The significant heterogeneity in evolutionary rate between annuals and perennials was consistently found both in nonsynonymous sites and synonymous sites. While a linear correlation of evolutionary rates in orthologous genes between species was observed in nonsynonymous sites, the correlation was weak or invisible in synonymous sites. This tendency was clearer in nuclear genes than in chloroplast genes, in which the overall evolutionary rate was small. The slope of the regression line was consistently lower than unity, further confirming the higher evolutionary rate in annuals at the genomic level.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The higher evolutionary rate in annuals than in perennials appears to be a universal phenomenon both in nuclear and chloroplast genomes in the four dicot model plants we investigated. Therefore, such heterogeneity in evolutionary rate should result from factors that have genome-wide influence, most likely those associated with annual/perennial life history. Although we acknowledge current limitations of this kind of study, mainly due to a small sample size available and a distant taxonomic relationship of the model organisms, our results indicate that the genome-wide survey is a promising approach toward further understanding of the mechanism determining the molecular evolutionary rate at the genomic level.</p

Large-Scale Landslide Susceptibility Mapping Using an Integrated Machine Learning Model: A Case Study in the Lvliang Mountains of China

Integration of different models may improve the performance of landslide susceptibility assessment, but few studies have tested it. The present study aims at exploring the way to integrating different models and comparing the results among integrated and individual models. Our objective is to answer this question: Will the integrated model have higher accuracy compared with individual model? The Lvliang mountains area, a landslide-prone area in China, was taken as the study area, and ten factors were considered in the influencing factors system. Three basic machine learning models (the back propagation (BP), support vector machine (SVM), and random forest (RF) models) were integrated by an objective function where the weight coefficients among different models were computed by the gray wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm. 80 and 20% of the landslide data were randomly selected as the training and testing samples, respectively, and different landslide susceptibility maps were generated based on the GIS platform. The results illustrated that the accuracy expressed by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of the BP-SVM-RF integrated model was the highest (0.7898), which was better than that of the BP (0.6929), SVM (0.6582), RF (0.7258), BP-SVM (0.7360), BP-RF (0.7569), and SVM-RF models (0.7298). The experimental results authenticated the effectiveness of the BP-SVM-RF method, which can be a reliable model for the regional landslide susceptibility assessment of the study area. Moreover, the proposed procedure can be a good option to integrate different models to seek an "optimal" result. Keywords: landslide susceptibility, random forest, integrated model, causal factor, GI