We proposed that inhibition of mitochondrial adenine nucleotide translocator (ANT) by long chain acyl-CoA (LCAC) underlies the mechanism associating obesity and type 2 diabetes. Here we test that after long-term exposure to a high-fat diet (HFD): (i) there is no adaptation of the mitochondrial compartment that would hinder such ANT inhibition, and (ii) ANT has significant control of the relevan...

Ant Colony Optimization is a metaheuristic that has been applied successfully to several optimization problems (for an overview see Dorigo and Di Caro [2]). Usually ant algorithms have been tested on benchmark problems or real world problems. In this paper we start studying the behaviour of ants algorithms on simple problems. The aim of this study is to show that some interesting aspects of ant...

—We quantified resident and migrant bird attendance at army ant swarm raids (n 5 48) in a neotropical montane forest. All observations were during seasons when Nearctic migrant birds are present. Bird species differed in army ant raid-attending behavior. Resident bird species attended 2 to 54% of raids, while migrants attended at lower maximum frequencies (2 to 21% of raids attended per species...

Background: Vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) are recognized as nosocomial pathogens with increased importance in recent years. These bacteria frequently isolated from patients admitted to intensive care units (ICUs). Enterococcal pathogenicity is enhanced by different antibiotic resistance and virulence determinants. Objectives: The present study aimed assess the prevalence of genes encod...

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) [2] is a nondeterministic algorithm framework that mimics the foraging behavior of ants to solve difficult optimization problems. Several researchers have successfully applied ant based algorithm framework in different fields of engineering, but never in VLSI testing. In this paper, we first describe the basics of ACO. We then consider the problem of simultaneously...

Recent studies have shown that the spatial pattern of nests of an arboreal ant, Azteca instabilis (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), in a tropical coffee agroecosystem may emerge through self-organization. The proposed self-organization process involves both local expansion and density-dependent mortality of the ant colonies. We explored a possible mechanism for the density-dependent mortality involvin...

In many ant species, the queens can keep spermatozoa alive in their spermatheca for several years, which goes along with unique morphological characteristics of the queen's spermatheca. The relative spermatheca size in ant queens is prominently larger than that in social wasps. Furthermore, the epithelium lining the spermatheca reservoir of ants consists of columnar cells in the hilar region an...

In [9], we presented a modified version of Ant-Miner (i.e. Ant-Miner2), where the core computation heuristic value was based on a simple density estimation heuristic. In this paper, we present a further study and introduce another ant-based algorithm, which uses a different pheromone updating strategy and state transition rule. By comparison with the work of Parpinelli et al, our method can imp...

Global warming is likely leading to species' distributional shifts, resulting in changes in local community compositions and diversity patterns. In this study, we applied species distribution models to evaluate the potential impacts of temperature increase on ant communities in Korean temperate forests, by testing hypotheses that 1) the risk of extinction of forest ant species would increase ov...

BALB/c mice immunized with bacterial levan (BL), a /3(2---*6) fructosan with fl(2--*l) branched points, produce antibodies of two general types (1). One group of molecules is specific for inulin, which is a fl(2---* 1) fructosan, as well as for levan; such antibodies, which can first be detected in BALB/c mice at 28 d of age (2), express idiotypes (Id) that cross-react with those found on inuli...