Yukawa Textures in Heterotic M-Theory
  We examine the structure of the Yukawa couplings in the 11 dimensional Horava-Witten M-theory based on non-standard embeddings. We find that the CKM and quark mass hierarchies can be explained in M Theory without introducing undue fine tuning. A phenomenological example is presented satisfying all CKM and quark mass data requiring the 5-branes cluster near the second orbifold plane, and that the instanton charges of the physical orbifold plane vanish. The latter condition is explicitly realized on a Calabi-Yau manifold with del Pezzo base dP_7. 
R. Arnowitt and B. Dutta