1-20 Anomalous Pion Production Induced by Nontrivial Topological Structure of QCD Vacuum

We suggest a new mechanism of the inclusive production of pions in high energy reactions, also knows as anomalous pion production (APP) since the formation of the pions happens at short distances due to instantons which have a much smaller size in comparison with the confinement scale. Furthermore, in our approach it is not needed to include in the calculation any fragmentation functions which are related to the hadronization and, therefore, to the confinement dynamics. As the result, the value of the inclusive pion cross section is determined by the structure of the short range fluctuations of gluonic fields in the QCD vacuum. This mechanism breaks the pQCD factorization and might be a corner stone of various phenomena observed in high energy reactions in the few GeV range for the transfer momentum.

1-19 Gluonic Structure of the Constituent Quark

Based on both the constituent quark picture and the instanton model for QCD vacuum, we calculate the unpolarized and polarized gluon distributions in the constituent quark and in the nucleon. Our approach consists of two main steps. At the first step, we follow the Altarelli-Parisi (AP) approach[1] to calculate the gluon distributions inside the constituent quark generated by the perturbative quark-gluon interaction, the non-perturbative quarkgluon interaction, and the non-perturbative quark-gluon-pion anomalous chromomagnetic interaction. The nonperturbative interactions are related to the existence of the instantons, strong topological fluctuations of gluon fields, in the QCD vacuum. At the second step, the convolution model is applied to derive the gluon distributions in the nucleon.

Development of a Specific CHIKV-E2 Monoclonal Antibody for Chikungunya Diagnosis

Chikungunya fever is a vector-borne viral disease transmitted to humans by chikungunya virus(CHIKV)-infected mosquitoes.There have been many outbreaks of CHIKV infection worldwide,and the virus poses ongoing risks to global health.To prevent and control CHIKV infection,it is important to improve the current CHIKV diagnostic approaches to allow for the detection of low CHIKV concentrations and to correctly distinguish CHIKV infections from those due to other mosquito-transmitted viruses,including dengue virus(DENV),Japanese encephalitis virus(JEV),and Zika virus(ZIKV).Here,we produced monoclonal antibodies(mAbs)against the CHIKV envelope 2 protein(CHIKV-E2)and compared their sensitivity and specificity with commercially available mAbs using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays(ELISA).Two anti-CHIKV-E2 mAbs,19-1 and 21-1,showed higher binding affinities to CHIKV-E2 protein than the commercial mAbs did.In particular,the 19-1 mAb had the strongest binding affinity to inactivated CHIKV.Moreover,the 19-1 mAb had very little cross-reactivity with other mosquito-borne viruses,such as ZIKV,JEV,and DENV.These results suggest that the newly produced anti-CHIKV-E2 mAb,19-1,could he used for CHIKV diagnostic approaches.