Coenzyme Q (CoQ) is an essential cofactor, primarily found in the mitochondrial inner membrane where it functions as an electron carrier in the respiratory chain, and as a lipophilic antioxidant. The ...redox state of the CoQ pool is the ratio of its oxidised (ubiquinone) and reduced (ubiquinol) forms, and is a key indicator of mitochondrial bioenergetic and antioxidant status. However, the role of CoQ redox state in vivo is poorly understood, because determining its value is technically challenging due to redox changes during isolation, extraction and analysis. To address these problems, we have developed a sensitive liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) assay that enables us to extract and analyse both the CoQ redox state and the magnitude of the CoQ pool with negligible changes to redox state from small amounts of tissue. This will enable the physiological and pathophysiological roles of the CoQ redox state to be investigated in vivo.
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•Sensitive LC-MS/MS assay to quantify CoQ redox state.•Changes in CoQ redox state can be measured in mitochondria, cells and in vivo.•CoQ redox state is stable during extraction and analysis.
We present the first example of binary microlensing for which the parameter measurements can be verified (or contradicted) by future Doppler observations. This test is made possible by a confluence ...of two relatively unusual circumstances. First, the binary lens is bright enough (I = 15.6) to permit Doppler measurements. Second, we measure not only the usual seven binary-lens parameters, but also the 'microlens parallax' (which yields the binary mass) and two components of the instantaneous orbital velocity. Thus, we measure, effectively, six 'Kepler+1' parameters (two instantaneous positions, two instantaneous velocities, the binary total mass, and the mass ratio). Since Doppler observations of the brighter binary component determine five Kepler parameters (period, velocity amplitude, eccentricity, phase, and position of periapsis), while the same spectroscopy yields the mass of the primary, the combined Doppler + microlensing observations would be overconstrained by 6 + (5 + 1) -- (7 + 1) = 4 degrees of freedom. This makes possible an extremely strong test of the microlensing solution. We also introduce a uniform microlensing notation for single and binary lenses, define conventions, summarize all known microlensing degeneracies, and extend a set of parameters to describe full Keplerian motion of the binary lenses.
In this work we present a keV-scale sterile-neutrino search with a low-tritium-activity data set of the KATRIN experiment, acquired in a commissioning run in 2018. KATRIN performs a spectroscopic ...measurement of the tritium
β
-decay spectrum with the main goal of directly determining the effective electron anti-neutrino mass. During this commissioning phase a lower tritium activity facilitated the measurement of a wider part of the tritium spectrum and thus the search for sterile neutrinos with a mass of up to
1.6
keV
. We do not find a signal and set an exclusion limit on the sterile-to-active mixing amplitude of
sin
2
θ
<
5
×
10
-
4
(
95
%
C.L.) at a mass of 0.3 keV. This result improves current laboratory-based bounds in the sterile-neutrino mass range between 0.1 and 1.0 keV.
We present the first measurement of the spatial clustering of mid-infrared-selected obscured and unobscured quasars, using a sample in the redshift range 0.7 < z < 1.8 selected from the 9 deg2 Bootes ...multiwavelength survey. Recently, the Spitzer Space Telescope and X-ray observations have revealed large populations of obscured quasars that have been inferred from models of the X-ray background and supermassive black hole evolution. To date, little is known about obscured quasar clustering, which allows us to measure the masses of their host dark matter halos and explore their role in the cosmic evolution of black holes and galaxies. In this study, we use a sample of 806 mid-infrared-selected quasars and 250,000 galaxies to calculate the projected quasar-galaxy cross-correlation function wp (R). The observed clustering yields characteristic dark matter halo masses of log(M halo h --1 M ) = 12.7+0.4 --0.6 and 13.3+0.3 --0.4 for unobscured quasars (QSO-1s) and obscured quasars (Obs-QSOs), respectively. The results for QSO-1s are in excellent agreement with previous measurements for optically selected quasars, while we conclude that the Obs-QSOs are at least as strongly clustered as the QSO-1s. We test for the effects of photometric redshift errors on the optically faint Obs-QSOs, and find that our method yields a robust lower limit on the clustering; photo-z errors may cause us to underestimate the clustering amplitude of the Obs-QSOs by at most ~20%. We compare our results to previous studies, and speculate on physical implications of stronger clustering for obscured quasars.
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