Records of double-flowered Silene dioica date from the late sixteenth century and four named varieties are grown today, as previously, for their horticultural interest. Although double-flowered mutants have been characterized in several plants, their study in dioecious species is of particular interest due to influences of the homeotic mutation on the different floral whorl configurations in ma...

Living organisms produce hydrogen peroxide (H(2)O(2)) to kill invading pathogens and for cellular signaling, but aberrant generation of this reactive oxygen species is a hallmark of oxidative stress and inflammation in aging, injury, and disease. The effects of H(2)O(2) on the overall health of living animals remain elusive, in part owing to a dearth of methods for studying this transient small...

The Japanese firefly squid Hotaru-ika (Watasenia scintillans) produces intense blue light from photophores at the tips of two arms. These photophores are densely packed with protein microcrystals that catalyse the bioluminescent reaction using ATP and the substrate coelenterazine disulfate. The squid is the only organism known to produce light using protein crystals. We extracted microcrystals ...

Evolutionary algorithms are the choice of many researchers for optimizing machining parameters. Even though evolutionary algorithms are commonly used for solving constrained optimization problems, however in practice sometimes they deliver only insignificant performance. The difficulty with evolutionary algorithms is that they start with random initial population and all its populations become ...

In recent years, future generation wireless communication technologies are most the prominent fields in which many innovative techniques are used for effective communication. Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing is one of the important technologies used for communication in future generation technologies. Although it gives efficient results, it has some problems during the implementation ...

Firefly luciferase catalyses a two-step reaction, using ATP-Mg2+, firefly luciferin and molecular oxygen as substrates, leading to the efficient emission of yellow-green light. We report the identification of novel luciferase mutants which combine improved pH-tolerance and thermostability and that retain the specific activity of the wild-type enzyme. These were identified by the mutagenesis of ...

Firefly luciferase is used widely as a reporter enzyme for studies of gene regulation and expression. The recent development of new technologies that combine luciferase reporter technology and digital imaging microscopy has enabled multiple measurements of gene expression in the same living cell. Although this approach has already provided new insights about expression dynamics, its future util...

As a nature-inspired search algorithm, firefly algorithm (FA) has several control parameters, which may have great effects on its performance. In this study, we investigate the parameter selection and adaptation strategies in a modified firefly algorithm - adaptive firefly algorithm (AdaFa). There are three strategies in AdaFa including (1) a distance-based light absorption coefficient; (2) a g...

The growth and protein export defects of Escherichia coli secA51(Ts) strains can be suppressed by the CsaA protein of Bacillus subtilis. The present studies indicate that this effect can be attributed to chaperone-like activities of CsaA. First, CsaA stimulated protein export in secB, groES and dnaJ mutant strains of E. coli. Second, CsaA suppressed the growth defects of dnaK, dnaJ and grpE mut...

Research the heart failure medical cases of TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) to effectively mine the association rules of differential diagnosis and treatment. TCM medical cases are of vast amounts of data and strong relatedness, and a new and improved firefly algorithm based on the guide of normative knowledge has been proposed to overcome the shortcomings of traditional association rules mi...