PURPOSE Recent evidence suggests that taurine and myoinositol may serve as organic osmolytes in a number of cells, including lens and retinal pigment epithelia, but the mechanism for their increased accumulation in response to hypertonic stress is not known. To assess whether NaK ATPase contributed to the elevated levels of taurine and myoinositol in cells exposed to hypertonic media, we measur...

abstract     crop residues are well known for their chemical (allelopathic) effects on crops. the allelopathic potential of the aqueous extracts and chopped residual of sorghum (sorghum bicolor l.) on germination, seedling growth, relative water content, seedling dry weight, seedling length and antioxidant enzyme activity namely catalase (cat), peroxidase (pod) and superoxide dismutase (sod) of...

Jason Treberg discusses the impact of Paul Yancey et al.'s classic paper 'Living with water stress: evolution of osmolyte systems', published in Science in 1982. Occasionally a hypothesis comes along that is so broadly applicable to biological systems that it borders on being universal. Even less frequent is when the hypothesis involves linking knowledge from almost a century before with recent...

The alleviation of oxidative damage and increased resistance to salt stress and to non-ionic osmotic stress induced by 100 mM NaCl or 100 mOsm polyethylene glycol (PEG) treatments, respectively, often correlate with a more efficient antioxidative defence systems and detoxification mechanisms. Pre-treatment of plants with salicylic acid (SA) enhanced antioxidant enzyme activities in concentratio...

conclusions troxerutin may reduce the vascular complications and tissue injuries induced by chronic diabetes in rat aorta through increasing the activity of tissue antioxidant system and reducing the level of lipid peroxidation. materials and methods male wistar rats were randomly divided into four groups (n = 8/each): control, control plus troxerutin, diabetic and diabetic plus troxerutin. dia...

Biodiesel, an alternative diesel fuel derived from transesterification of vegetable oils or animal fats, is composed of saturated and unsaturated long-chain fatty acid alkyl esters. When exposed to air during storage, autoxidation of biodiesel can cause degradation of fuel quality by adversely affecting properties such as kinematic viscosity, acid value and peroxide value. One approach for incr...

We take advantage of our previous observation that neutral osmolytes can strongly slow down the rate of DNA-protein complex dissociation to develop a method that uses osmotic stress to 'freeze' mixtures of DNA-protein complexes and prevent further reaction enabling analysis of the products. We apply this approach to the gel mobility shift assay and use it to modify a self-cleavage assay that us...

air pollution is the most important environmental problem of last century that threatens the health of living organisms, especially plants. so2 is one of the main air pollutants that can cause to imbalance in growth and physiological function of plant in high concentrations. symbiosis of rhizobium bacteria with alfalfa can cause increasing plant growth and plant resistance to abiotic stresses. ...