Combined inhalation and oral supplementation of Vitamin A and Vitamin D: A possible prevention and therapy for tuberculosis

Tuberculosis is continuing as a problem of mankind. With evolution, MDR and XDR forms of tuberculosis have emerged from drug sensitive strain. MDR and XDR strains are resistant to most of the antibiotics, making the management more difficult. BCG vaccine is not providing complete protection against tuberculosis. Therefore new infections are spreading at a tremendous rate. At the present moment there is experimental evidence to believe that Vitamin A and Vitamin D has anti-mycobacterial property. It is in this context, we have hypothesized a host based approach using the above vitamins that can cause possible prevention and cure of tuberculosis with minimal chance of resistance or toxicity. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Structural and functional analysis of two universal stress proteins YdaA and YnaF from Salmonella typhimurium: possible roles in microbial stress tolerance

In many organisms ``Universal Stress Proteins'' CUSPS) are induced in response to a variety of environmental stresses. Here we report the structures of two USPs, YnaF and YdaA from Salmonella typhimurium determined at 1.8 angstrom and 2.4 angstrom resolutions, respectively. YnaF consists of a single USP domain and forms a tetrameric organization stabilized by interactions mediated through chloride ions. YdaA is a larger protein consisting of two tandem USP domains. Two protomers of YdaA associate to form a structure similar to the YnaF tetramer. YdaA showed ATPase activity and an ATP binding motif G-2X-G-9X-G(S/T/N) was found in its C-terminal domain. The residues corresponding to this motif were not conserved in YnaF although YnaF could bind ATP. However, unlike YdaA, YnaF did not hydrolyse ATP in vitro. Disruption of interactions mediated through chloride ions by selected mutations converted YnaF into an ATPase. Residues that might be important for ATP hydrolysis could be identified by comparing the active sites of native and mutant structures. Only the C-terminal domain of YdaA appears to be involved in ATP hydrolysis. The structurally similar N-terminal domain was found to bind a zinc ion near the segment equivalent to the phosphate binding loop of the C-terminal domain. Mass spectrometric analysis showed that YdaA might bind a ligand of approximate molecular weight 800 daltons. Structural comparisons suggest that the ligand, probably related to an intermediate in lipid A biosynthesis, might bind at a site close to the zinc ion. Therefore, the N-terminal domain of YdaA binds zinc and might play a role in lipid metabolism. Thus, USPs appear to perform several distinct functions such as ATP hydrolysis, altering membrane properties and chloride sensing. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Modified Einstein's gravity as a possible missing link between sub- and super-Chandrasekhar type Ia supernovae

We explore the effect of modification to Einstein's gravity in white dwarfs for the first time in the literature, to the best of our knowledge. This leads to significantly sub- and super-Chandrasekhar limiting masses of white dwarfs, determined by a single model parameter. On the other hand, type Ia supernovae (SNeIa), a key to unravel the evolutionary history of the universe, are believed to be triggered in white dwarfs having mass close to the Chandrasekhar limit. However, observations of several peculiar, under- and over-luminous SNeIa argue for exploding masses widely different from this limit. We argue that explosions of the modified gravity induced sub- and super-Chandrasekhar limiting mass white dwarfs result in under- and over-luminous SNeIa respectively, thus unifying these two apparently disjoint sub-classes and, hence, serving as a missing link. Our discovery raises two fundamental questions. Is the Chandrasekhar limit unique? Is Einstein's gravity the ultimate theory for understanding astronomical phenomena? Both the answers appear to be no!

Kernelization complexity of possible winner and coalitional manipulation problems in voting

In the POSSIBLE WINNER problem in computational social choice theory, we are given a set of partial preferences and the question is whether a distinguished candidate could be made winner by extending the partial preferences to linear preferences. Previous work has provided, for many common voting rules, fixed parameter tractable algorithms for the POSSIBLE WINNER problem, with number of candidates as the parameter. However, the corresponding kernelization question is still open and in fact, has been mentioned as a key research challenge 10]. In this paper, we settle this open question for many common voting rules. We show that the POSSIBLE WINNER problem for maximin, Copeland, Bucklin, ranked pairs, and a class of scoring rules that includes the Borda voting rule does not admit a polynomial kernel with the number of candidates as the parameter. We show however that the COALITIONAL MANIPULATION problem which is an important special case of the POSSIBLE WINNER problem does admit a polynomial kernel for maximin, Copeland, ranked pairs, and a class of scoring rules that includes the Borda voting rule, when the number of manipulators is polynomial in the number of candidates. A significant conclusion of our work is that the POSSIBLE WINNER problem is harder than the COALITIONAL MANIPULATION problem since the COALITIONAL MANIPULATION problem admits a polynomial kernel whereas the POSSIBLE WINNER problem does not admit a polynomial kernel. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The 2014 M-w 6.1 Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean, Earthquake: A Possible Association with the 85 degrees E Ridge

Oceanic intraplate earthquakes are known to occur either on active ridge-transform structures or by reactivation of their inactive counterparts, generally referred to as fossil ridges or transforms. The Indian Ocean, one of the most active oceanic intraplate regions, has generated large earthquakes associated with both these types of structures. The moderate earthquake that occurred on 21 May 2014 (M-w 6.1) in the northern Bay of Bengal followed an alternate mechanism, as it showed no clear association either with active or extinct ridge-transform structures. Its focal depth of >50 km is uncommon but not improbable, given the similar to 90 Ma age of the ocean floor with 12-km-thick overlying sediments. No tectonic features have been mapped in the near vicinity of its epicenter, the closest being the 85 degrees E ridge, located similar to 100 km to its west, hitherto regarded as seismically inactive. The few earthquakes that have occurred here in the past are clustered around its southern or northern limits, and a few are located midway, at around 10 degrees N. The 2014 earthquake, sourced close to the northern cluster, seems to be associated with a northwest-southeast-oriented fracture, located on the eastern flanks of the 85 degrees E ridge. If this causal association is possible, we believe that reactivation of fossil hotspot trails could be considered as another mechanism for oceanic intraplate seismicity.

Future collider signatures of the possible 750 GeV state

If the recent indications of a possible state I broken vertical bar with mass similar to 750 GeV decaying into two photons reported by ATLAS and CMS in LHC collisions at 13 TeV were to become confirmed, the prospects for future collider physics at the LHC and beyond would be affected radically, as we explore in this paper. Even minimal scenarios for the I broken vertical bar resonance and its gamma gamma decays require additional particles with masses . We consider here two benchmark scenarios that exemplify the range of possibilities: one in which I broken vertical bar is a singlet scalar or pseudoscalar boson whose production and gamma gamma decays are due to loops of coloured and charged fermions, and another benchmark scenario in which I broken vertical bar is a superposition of (nearly) degenerate CP-even and CP-odd Higgs bosons in a (possibly supersymmetric) two-Higgs doublet model also with additional fermions to account for the gamma gamma decay rate. We explore the implications of these benchmark scenarios for the production of I broken vertical bar and its new partners at colliders in future runs of the LHC and beyond, at higher-energy pp colliders and at e (+) e (-) and gamma gamma colliders, with emphasis on the bosonic partners expected in the doublet scenario and the fermionic partners expected in both scenarios.