Our lab studies the role of autophagy and mitochondrial quality control in cellular homeostasis. The mitochondrial network is a finely tuned and adaptable organelle system that must remain healthy in order to generate sufficient ATP for cellular function [1]. Indeed, disturbances in mitochondrial homeostasis result in a damaged and dysfunctional mitochondrial network that can pose a serious thr...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES In drug resistant, especially multi-drug resistant (MDR) tuberculosis, fluoroquinolones (FQs) are used as second line drugs. However, the incidence of FQ-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis is rapidly increasing which may be due to extensive use of FQs in the treatment of various other diseases. The most important known mechanism i.e., gyrA mutation in FQ resistance is ...

Redox signaling provides a quick and efficient mechanism for clonal or colonial organisms to adapt their growth and development to aspects of the environment, e.g. the food supply. A 'signature' of mitochondrial redox signaling, particularly as mediated by reactive oxygen species (ROS), can be elucidated by experimental manipulation of the electron transport chain. The major sites of ROS format...

The transport kinetics of the positively charged triphenylmethane dye, malachite green (MG(+)), across liposome bilayers effects the transport of monovalent inorganic cations when ionophores are present in the membrane. Three different types of ionophores characterized by different transport mechanisms have been studied. The ionophores are gramicidin A (gA) (a channel former), valinomycin (VAL)...

Semi-supervised learning tries to employ a large collection of unlabeled data and a few labeled examples for improving generalization performance, which has been proved meaningful in real-world applications. The bottleneck of exiting semi-supervised approaches lies in over long training time due to the large scale unlabeled data. In this article we introduce a novel method for semi-supervised l...

In Paramecium, secretory proteins are packaged within membrane-bounded vesicles in a condensed form. This form expands when the proteins are released. We have now determined that a proton gradient is present in the secretory vesicles of living Paramecium. Acridine Orange, used as an in vivo indicator of acidic compartments, stained the secretory vesicles in both wild-type and mutant cells. Addi...

The de novo expression of Escherichia coli K1, K5, and K12 capsules was analyzed with immunoelectron microscopy in temperature upshift experiments, with upshift from 18 degrees C (capsule restrictive) to 37 degrees C (capsule permissive). Newly produced capsular polysaccharides appeared at the cell surface atop membrane adhesion sites (Bayer's junctions). After plasmolysis of the bacteria at an...

In this paper, we study the global convergence of majorization minimization (MM) algorithms for solving nonconvex regularized optimization problems. MM algorithms have received great attention in machine learning. However, when applied to nonconvex optimization problems, the convergence of MM algorithms is a challenging issue. We introduce theory of the KurdykaLojasiewicz inequality to address ...