Distinct Patterns of Selection in Selenium-Dependent Genes between Land and Aquatic Vertebrates.

Selenium (Se), a sparse element on earth, is an essential micronutrient in the vertebrate diet and its intake depends on its content in soils and waters worldwide. Selenium is required due to its function in selenoproteins, which contain selenocysteine (Sec), the 21st amino acid in the genetic code, as one of their constituent residues. Selenocysteine is analogous to the amino acid cysteine (Cys), which uses the abounding element sulfur instead.

SelenoDB 2.0: annotation of selenoprotein genes in animals and their genetic diversity in humans.

SelenoDB (http://www.selenodb.org) aims to provide high-quality annotations of selenoprotein genes, proteins and SECIS elements.

How to look for supersymmetry under the LHC lamppost.

We apply a model-independent, agnostic approach to the collider phenomenology of supersymmetry, in which all mass parameters are taken as free inputs at the weak scale. We consider the gauginos, Higgsinos, and the first two generations of sleptons and squarks, and analyze all possible mass hierarchies among them (4×8!=161,280 in total) in which the lightest superpartner is neutral, leading to missing energy. In each case, we identify the full set of the dominant decay chains originating from the lightest colored superpartner.