Cholesterol and sphingomyelin (SM) associate in raft domains and are metabolically coregulated. One aspect of coordinate regulation occurs in the Golgi apparatus where oxysterol binding protein (OSBP) mediates sterol-dependent activation of ceramide transport protein (CERT) activity and SM synthesis. Because CERT transfer activity is dependent on its phosphatidylinositol 4 phosphate [PtdIns(4)P...

A circadian rhythm in plasma mevalonate was identified in human subjects. This variation, over a 5-fold range, is paralleled by a rhythm in urinary excretion. No such diurnal change in plasma mevalonate was observed in schedule-fed, light-cycled rats, despite the presence of a pronounced rhythm in liver HMG-Coa reductase and sterol synthesis. A linear correlation was found between liver HMG-CoA...

The semantic content determination or attribute selection of definite descriptions is one of the most traditional tasks in natural language generation. Algorithms of this kind are required to produce descriptions that are brief (or even minimal) and, at the same time, as close as possible to the choices made by human speakers. In this work we attempt to achieve a balance between brevity and hum...

Two variants of a polarimetric method to determine ice water content are presented. One uses specific differential phase and differential reflectivity and the other uses specific differential phase; both quantities are for a 10-cm wavelength. Theoretical considerations indicate that these polarimetric methods are suited for pristine ice crystals. Ice water content of lightly to moderately aggre...

Bouayad-Agha et al. (2012) issued a content determination challenge in which researchers were asked to create systems that can automatically select content suitable for a first paragraph in a Wikipedia article from an RDF knowledge base of information about people. This article is a description of the system built at the University of Aberdeen. Our working assumption is that the target text sho...

In this project, different nettle plants from north regions of Iran including Tonekabon, Amol and Gorgan were collected. The oil was extracted using soxhlet extraction apparatus and was subjected to series of physical and chemical tests and determinations consisting of refractive index, melting point, smoke point, nonsaponifiable matter, Iodine value, saponification value, peroxide value, totox...

Seeds are very important not only in the life cycle of the plant but they represent food sources for man and animals. We report herein a mutant of 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A synthase (HMGS), the second enzyme in the mevalonate (MVA) pathway that can improve seed yield when overexpressed in a phylogenetically distant species. In Brassica juncea, the characterisation of four isogenes e...

Yeast cells of five different strains of Paracoccidioides brasiliensis were obtained for partial analysis of lipid composition, and sterol content was determined quantitatively and qualitatively. The determinations were conducted with cells cultured in the presence and absence of amphotericin B and azole derivatives at levels below the MIC.