The possibility of distinguishing between two higgs production mechanisms, W fusion and gluon fusion, due to rapidity gap existence is investigated using the Monte Carlo event generator PYTHIA. It is shown that, considering the designed CM energy and luminosity for the LHC, it is not possible to distinguish between the two higgs production processes as, for a given integrated luminosity, they l...

Tunicates are lower chordates that include among others the two ascidians Ciona intestinalis and Ciona savignyi. This subphylum is particularly interesting because it shares many developmental and physiological characteristics, as well as basic gene repertoires, with vertebrates [1,2]. A fertilized ascidian egg develops within a day in a transparent tadpole-like larva having a body plan similar...

The development of Next Generation Sequencing technologies, capable of sequencing hundreds of millions of short reads (25-70 bp each) in a single run, is opening the door to population genomic studies of non-model species. In this paper we present SHRiMP - the SHort Read Mapping Package: a set of algorithms and methods to map short reads to a genome, even in the presence of a large amount of po...

Evidence for the tickborne nature of Alkhurma hemorrhagic fever virus (AHFV) is indirect because AHFV has not been detected in arthropods. One Ornithodoros savignyi tick from Saudi Arabia contained AHFV RNA. This is the first direct evidence that AHFV is a tickborne flavivirus and confirms the association between human AHFV cases and tickbite history.

A long-spined sea urchin Diadema-sp reported from Japanese waters was genetically distinct from all known Diadema species, but it remained undescribed. Extensive field surveys in Japan with molecular identification performed in the present study determined five phenotypes (I to V) in Diadema-sp according to the presence and/or shape of a white streak and blue iridophore lines in the naked space...