No abstract

Huanglongbing (HLB) constitutes the most destructive disease of citrus worldwide, yet no established efficient management measures exist for it. Brassinosteroids, a family of plant steroidal compounds, are essential for plant growth, development and stress tolerance. As a possible control strategy for HLB, epibrassinolide was applied to as a foliar spray to citrus plants infected with the causal agent of HLB, ‘Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus’. The bacterial titers were reduced after treatment with epibrassinolide under both greenhouse and field conditions but were stronger in the greenhouse. Known defense genes were induced in leaves by epibrassinolide. With the SuperSAGE technology combined with next generation sequencing, induction of genes known to be associated with defense response to bacteria and hormone transduction pathways were identified. The results demonstrate that epibrassinolide may provide a useful tool for the management of HLB.

Flavor symmetriesà la Froggatt-Nielsen (FN) provide a compelling way to explain the hierarchies of fermionic masses and mixing angles in the Yukawa sector. In Supersymmetric (SUSY) extensions of the Standard Model where the mediation of SUSY breaking occurs at scales larger than the breaking of flavor, this symmetry must be respected not only by the Yukawas of the superpotential, but by the soft-breaking masses and trilinear terms as well. In this work we show that contrary to naive expectations, even starting with completely flavor blind soft-breaking in the full theory at high scales, the low-energy sfermion mass matrices and trilinear terms of the effective theory, obtained upon integrating out the heavy mediator fields, are strongly non-universal. We explore the phenomenology of these SUSY flavor models after the latest LHC searches for new physics.

Malacological samplings were made from January 1994 to December 1996 in the Albufera Natural Park (Valencia, Spain) to trace the dynamics of molluscan populations and the prevalence and intensity of infection by larval trematodes. A total of 10,533 freshwater gastropods belonging to seven species (Lymnaea auricularia, L. truncatula, L. palustris, L. peregra, Bithynia tentaculata, Physa acuta and Gyraulus chinensis) was examined, and 110 (1.04%) were found to harbour some of the nine distinguishable types of cercariae, namely four echinostome cercariae (Hypoderaeum conoideum, Echinoparyphium recurvatum, Euparyphium albuferensis, and Echinostoma sp.), four furcocercous cercariae, and one xiphidiocercous cercaria. This study shows that the composition of the snail and trematode communities may be determined by the particular environmental conditions present and the human intervention in the area.

We present a toy model in which the Higgs sector fields transform as non-Abelian representations of a family symmetry group, and consider the possibility that the extra family partners of the Higgs particles act as messengers for both supersymmetry and family symmetry breakings. Although such mediation schemes generically produce family dependent soft supersymmetry breaking terms at the messenger scale, we demonstrate the existence of a focusing mechanism which may erase such hierarchies through renormalization group running.

We present the results of a numerical search for the Dirac Yukawa matrices of the Standard Model, consistent with the quark and lepton masses and their mixing angles. We assume a diagonal up-quark matrix, natural in Z7 ⋊ Z3, Bimaximal or Tri-bimaximal seesaw mixing, and SU (5) unification to relate the down-quark and charged lepton Dirac Yukawa matrices using Georgi-Jarlskog mechanisms. The measured value of θ13 requires an asymmetric down-quark Yukawa matrix. Satisfying the measured values of both θ13 and the electron mass restricts the number of solutions, underlying the importance of the recent measurement of the reactor angle. *

We extend the recently proposed SU (5) × T 13 model for the asymmetric texture to the up-type quark and Seesaw sectors. The hierarchical up-type quark masses are generated from higher-dimensional operators involving family-singlet Higgses, gauge-singlet familons, and vector-like messengers. The complex-Tribimaximal (TBM) Seesaw mixing arises from the vacuum structure of a minimal number of familons, resulting in an alignment between the Yukawa and Majorana matrices of the Seesaw formula. Introducing four right-handed neutrinos, normal ordering of the light neutrino masses is obtained, with m ν1 = 27.6 meV, m ν2 = 28.9 meV and m ν3 = 57.8 meV. Their sum almost saturates Planck's cosmological upper bound (120 meV). The right-handed neutrino masses are expressed in terms of two parameters for a particular choice of familon vacuum alignment. We predict the¨CP Jarlskog-Greenberg invariant to be |J | = 0.028, consistent with the current PDG estimate, and Majorana invariants |I 1 | = 0.106 and |I 2 | = 0.011. A sign ambiguity in the model parameters leads to two possibilities for the invariant mass parameter |m ββ |: 13.02 meV or 25.21 meV, both within an order of magnitude of the most rigorous experimental upper limit (61-165 meV). *

We propose T13 = Z13 Z3 as the underlying non-Abelian discrete family symmetry of the asymmetric texture presented in [1]. Its mod 13 arithmetic distinguishes each Yukawa matrix element of the texture. We construct a model of effective interactions that singles out the asymmetry and equates, without finetuning, the products of down-quark and charged-lepton masses at a GUT-like scale. *