Volume 68

iTHEMS Weekly News Letter

Seminar Report

iTHEMS Program Director gave a talk at the 28th RIKEN Satosho Seminar

2019-09-04

Program Director of iTHEMS, Prof. Tetsuo Hatsuda gave a talk at the 28th RIKEN Satosho Seminar on Aug. 29, 2019.

Research News

iTHEMS is focused on RIKEN NEWS

2019-09-04

iTHEMS is focused on RIKEN NEWS. See the cover and the article on August issue (page 6 from the following link).

Press Release

Jeffrey Fawcett thumbnail

Genomic analysis of 370 Japanese Thoroughbred horses: the genetic background of why Thoroughbreds can run fast

2019-09-04

Humans have been trying to improve Thoroughbreds by selectively breeding horses that can run fast. Each generation, a small number of males are selected to breed so that only these “elite” males can pass on their genes to the following generation. In this study, we examined how this continuous artificial selection has affected the evolution of the genomes of Thoroughbreds. First, we found that the genetic diversity is low in Thoroughbreds due to repeated inbreeding since even before the establishment of Thoroughbreds. Second, we found several regions that exhibit signatures of artificial selection. These regions typically show locally reduced genetic variation and should contain genes that are important for the athletic performance of Thoroughbreds. This study opens the way for genomic information to be utilized in the selective breeding of Thoroughbreds.

Reference

  1. Jeffrey A. Fawcett , Fumio Sato, Takahiro Sakamoto, Watal M. Iwasaki, Teruaki Tozaki, Hideki Innan, Genome-wide SNP analysis of Japanese Thoroughbred racehorses, PLOS ONE 14: e0218407 (2019), doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0218407

Research News

Gilles Ferrand was highlighted in a recent article of RIKEN Research
Gilles Ferrand thumbnail

Gilles Ferrand was highlighted in a recent article of RIKEN Research "Supernova remnants used to probe how star explosion took shape"

2019-08-30

RIKEN astrophysicists have bridged the gap between studies of supernova and those of their remnants by using the output of a supernova model as the input for a model of a supernova remnant. This approach offers a way to assess the validity of supernova models.

Upcoming Events

Seminar

STAMP Seminar

Introduction to quantum many-body system

September 5 (Thu) - 6 (Fri), 2019

Hosho Katsura (Associate Professor, Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo)

Venue: #535-537, Main Research Building, RIKEN / #435-437, Main Research Building, RIKEN

Event Official Language: Japanese

Seminar

iTHEMS Biology Seminar

September 13 (Fri) at 15:00 - 17:20, 2019

Hiroyuki Kubota (Professor, Medical Institute of Bioregulation, Kyushu University)
Yasufumi Uezu (Researcher, Sensory And Motor Research Group, NTT Communication Science Laboratories)

Timetable
15:00-16:00 Hiroyuki Kubota (Kyushu Univ.)
16:00-16:20 Break
16:20-17:20 Yasufumi Uezu (NTT)

Time: 15:00-16:00
Speaker: Hiroyuki Kubota (Kyushu Univ.)
Title: Regulation of insulin action by temporal patterns of insulin

Abstract: Cells respond to various extracellular stimuli through a limited number of signaling pathways. One strategy to process such stimuli is to code the information into the temporal patterns of molecules. Almost all hormones exhibit distinct temporal patterns and the importance of their patterns has been reported. However, the mechanisms of how hormones regulate downstream molecules depending on their temporal patterns remain unknown. We focused on insulin which plays crucial roles on glucose homeostasis and shows several temporal patterns in vivo. In this study, we show how the Insulin signaling pathway processes the information encoded into the temporal patterns of blood insulin using a cultured cell line and mice. We found that insulin patterns selectively regulate the insulin-AKT pathway, metabolites, and mRNAs. Mathematical modeling revealed the mechanisms via differences in network structures and from sensitivity and time constants. Given that almost all hormones exhibit distinct temporal patterns, temporal coding may be a general principle of system homeostasis by hormones.

Time: 16:20-17:20
Speaker: Yasufumi Uezu (NTT)
Title: Source-filter interaction brings various representation in speech and singing voice

Abstract: Speech plays a very important role in human communication. The source-filter interaction, a model that takes into account the actual speech production process, assumes that the sound source generation mechanism and the vocal-tract filter are not independent, but affect each other physiologically and acoustically. It is known that the source-filter interaction brings about non-linearity of speech and singing, such as singing voice with a loud volume and wide pitch range like an opera singer, or voice register transition where the vocal suppression and/or the voice pitch jump occurs. I would like to introduce my researches targeting non-linear vocalization phenomena due to the source-filter interaction and results of measuring and analyzing the time waveform of speech sound and vocal-fold vibrations through measurement experiments.

Venue: #424-426, Main Research Building, RIKEN

Event Official Language: Japanese

Seminar

ABBL-iTHEMS Joint Astro Seminar

Angular power spectrum analysis on current and future high-energy neutrino data

September 18 (Wed) at 14:00 - 15:00, 2019

Ariane Dekker (Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

The astrophysical neutrino events that have been measured in the last couple of years show an isotropic distribution on the sky. To constrain the contribution of source populations to the observed neutrino sky, we consider isotropic and anisotropic components of the diffuse neutrino data. We simulate through-going muon neutrino events by applying statistical distributions for the fluxes of extra-galactic sources and investigate the sensitivities of current (IceCube) and future (IceCube-Gen2 and KM3NeT)
experiments. I will show that the angular power spectrum is a powerful probe to assess the angular characteristics of neutrino data and demonstrate that we are already constraining rare and bright sources with current IceCube data.
In addition, I will investigate the decay and annihilation of very heavy dark matter as a potential neutrino source suggested by the excess in HESE data. We apply our angular power spectrum analysis to HESE data for different channels, allowing us to interpret the observed neutrino sky and perform a sensitivity forecast.

Venue: #160, 1F, Main Research Building, RIKEN

Event Official Language: English

Colloquium

iTHEMS Colloquium

Topological phases of matter and operator algebras

October 4 (Fri) at 15:30 - 17:00, 2019

Yasuyuki Kawahigashi (Senior Visiting Scientist, iTHEMS / Professor, Graduate School of Mathematical Sciences, The University of Tokyo)

Topological phases of matter are hot topics in recent physics and related to a wide range of mathematical fields. I will talk about their aspects related to operator algebras. Our emphasis will be on theory of tensor categories which describe interactions of anyons. This theory plays an important role in topological quantum computations.
In theory of operator algebras, Jones initiated theory of subfactors and discovered the Jones polynomial, a new topological invariant for knots as an application. We apply this theory to mathematical studies of anyons.

Venue: Okochi Hall, 1F Laser Science Laboratory, RIKEN

Broadcast: R511, Computational Science Research Building, R-CCS, Kobe Campus, RIKEN / SUURI-COOL (Kyoto), #204-205, 2F Maskawa Building for Education and Research, North Campus, Kyoto University / SUURI-COOL (Sendai), #303, 3F AIMR Main Building, Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR), Tohoku University

Event Official Language: English

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