Transcriptional Changes in Schistosoma mansoni during Early Schistosomula Development and in the Presence of Erythrocytes

Schistosome blood flukes cause more mortality and morbidity than any other human worm infection, but current control methods primarily rely on a single drug. There is a desperate need for new approaches to control this parasite, including vaccines. People become infected when the free-swimming larva, the cercaria, enters through the skin and becomes the schistosomulum. Schistosomula are susceptible to immune responses during their first few days in the host before they become adult parasites. We characterised the genes that these newly transformed parasites switch on when they enter the host to identify molecules that are critical for survival in the human host. Some of these highly up-regulated genes can be targeted for future development of new vaccines and drugs

Search for anomalous t t-bar production in the highly-boosted all-hadronic final state

A search is presented for a massive particle, generically referred to as a Z', decaying into a t t-bar pair. The search focuses on Z' resonances that are sufficiently massive to produce highly Lorentz-boosted top quarks, which yield collimated decay products that are partially or fully merged into single jets. The analysis uses new methods to analyze jet substructure, providing suppression of the non-top multijet backgrounds. The analysis is based on a data sample of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5 inverse femtobarns. Upper limits in the range of 1 pb are set on the product of the production cross section and branching fraction for a topcolor Z' modeled for several widths, as well as for a Randall--Sundrum Kaluza--Klein gluon. In addition, the results constrain any enhancement in t t-bar production beyond expectations of the standard model for t t-bar invariant masses larger than 1 TeV.Comment: Submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics; this version includes a minor typo correction that will be submitted as an erratu

Study of double-tagged gamma gamma events at LEPII

Double-tagged interactions of photons with virtualities Q^2 between 10 GeV^2 and 200 GeV^2 are studied with the data collected by DELPHI at LEPII from 1998 to 2000, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 550 pb^{-1}. The gam* gam* -> mu+mu- data agree with QED predictions. The cross-section of the reaction gam* gam* -> hadrons is measured and compared to the LO and NLO BFKL calculations.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, Accepted by Eur. Phys. J.

Studies of jet mass in dijet and W/Z plus jet events

This is the pre-print version of the final published paper that is available from the link below.Invariant mass spectra for jets reconstructed using the anti-kT and Cambridge-Aachen algorithms are studied for different jet “grooming” techniques in data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5 fb-1, recorded with the CMS detector in proton-proton collisions at the LHC at a center-of-mass energy of 7TeV. Leading-order QCD predictions for inclusive dijet and W/Z+jet production combined with parton-shower Monte Carlo models are found to agree overall with the data, and the agreement improves with the implementation of jet grooming methods used to distinguish merged jets of large transverse momentum from softer QCD gluon radiation

Inclusional complex study between 6-p-toluidinylnaphthalene-2-sulfonate and 2-hydroxypropyl-beta-cyclodextrin

6-p-Toluidinylnaphthalene-2-sulfonate (TNS) is used as a fluorescent probe for exploring hydrophobic regions of several biological substances, such as proteins, and studying solution state folding behaviour. The current study examines the complexation of TNS with 2-hydroxypropyl-beta-cyclodextrin (HPbetaCD) in aqueous solution, mainly by ultraviolet spectrophotometry using various concentrations of HPbetaCD. The structure of HPbetaCD was confirmed by using positive-ion electrospray ionization (ESI+) mass spectrometry. The complex was examined for its stoichiometry applying the continuous variation (Job plot) method. Also, the kinetics of the complex formation was monitored and the determination of the stability constant was calculated. For this purpose, the spectrophotometric properties of TNS were observed in the presence of increasing concentrations of HPbetaCD applying the transformed Benesi-Hildebrand linear model as well as a nonlinear one. The results suggest that TNS forms a stable complex of 1:1 molar ratio, at least at the examined concentrations. Furthermore, from the measurements of H-1 nuclear magnetic resonance (H-1 NMR) spectra, interactions between protons of TNS with HPbetaCD were determined. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved