לוח שנה משולב

Karl Skorecki and his colleagues used a combination of population genetics and evolutionary medicine approaches to identify two sets of genetic sequence variants in the APOL1 innate immunity gene which account for 70% of the 4-fold disparity in chronic kidney disease in populations of Sub-Saharan African ancestry.

These variants rose to high allele frequency in the at-risk population due to past adaptive selection, which also facilitated population based disease risk gene discovery using admixture mapping. Odds ratios conferred by these variants range from 7 to 90 depending on epistatic and environmental interactions. Pathobiology, target identification, and drug discovery studies are now proceeding using a variety of experimental platforms and scientific collaborations which will be highlighted.

Dark matter (DM) is one of the most intriguing open problems in modern particle- and astrophysics. Direct, indirect, and collider searches have not yet conclusively established the particle nature of dark matter. After a short overview of dark-matter physics, I will focus on recent theoretical efforts to increase the discovery potential of dark-matter searches. If dark matter indeed has particle nature, then direct detection via scattering on atomic nuclei is one of the most promising discovery channels. Effective field theories (EFT) are the appropriate framework to describe the scattering process, involving physics at very different energy scales. I will show that radiative corrections can have a large impact on the interpretation of data, and stress the importance of a consistent EFT framework.
DM searches at particle colliders provide complementary information. If the relic abundance of dark matter is determined by co-annihilation processes in the early universe, this can lead to to characteristic signatures at the LHC. I will discuss these signatures in general terms and point out that not all of them are covered by current serches. Finally, I will illustrate the general strategy with a specific case study, where the coannihilation process is mediated by a scalar leptoquark. I will briefly discuss cosmological probes, collider searches, and constraints from precision physics.

TBA

Ultracold molecules are currently a topic of great interest in AMO physics. One method for forming such molecules is photoassociation, where two colliding atoms absorb a photon and are bound into an excited molecule. We examine a variation of this process in Rb2, using frequency-chirped light on the nanosecond time scale. In the case of a positive chirp, the photoassociation can be followed by stimulated emission into a high vibrational level of the lowest-lying (metastable) triplet state. We show that this two-step process can be enhanced by a judicious shape of the chirp. Quantum simulations of the molecular formation are not only in good agreement with the experimental results, but also give insight into the enhancement mechanism.

The process of self-replication is at the core of Biological systems. Therefore, understanding the constraints that act on the process of self-replication is crucial. However, little is known about the physical and evolutionary constraints that shape the observed behavior of Biological Systems. We show that molecular noise can be exploited by bacteria to spread the time-scale of self-replication. However noise is not always the underlying cause of variability in clonal cells populations. We show that the variability of self-replication times in mammalian cells is governed by a deterministic process.