Background. There are different metabolic syndrome traits among patients with different ethnicities. Methods. We investigated this by studying 44 South Asians and 54 Europeans and classified them in three groups according to the occurrence of metabolic syndrome (MetS) and Type 2 Diabetes (T2D). Insulin sensitivity index (ISI), static, dynamic, and total beta-cell responsivity indices (Φ), and d...

Laboratory measurements of the fine space-time structure of short gravity-capillary waves, as well as Ku-band scattering at grazing and moderate incidence from spilling and plunging breaking waves in a wave channel are presented. Unsteady breaking waves are generated by focusing the waves in space and time. A scanning laser slope gauge was used for measuring short waves of wavelength 0.2-20cm, ...

Candida albicans is an opportunistic pathogen. Its proliferation in human hosts is believed to be controlled by immunologic mechanisms. The plasma membrane of the fungus posseses an H+-ATPase (PM-ATPase) which actively extrudes protons to generate an electrochemical gradient which is used in co-transport of nutrients. This ATPase is associated with the growth, dimorphism and pathogenicity of th...

Mitochondrial dynamics, including fusion, fission and translocation, are crucial to cellular homeostasis, with roles in cellular polarity, stress response and apoptosis. Mitochondrial fission has received particular attention, owing to links with several neurodegenerative diseases. A central player in fission is the cytoplasmic dynamin-related GTPase Drp1, which oligomerizes at the fission site...

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal motor neuron disease presenting as sporadic (sALS) or familial (fALS) forms. Even if the list of the genes underlining ALS greatly expanded, defects in superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1), encoding the copper/zinc SOD1, still remain a major cause of fALS and are likely involved also in apparently sporadic presentations. The pathogenesis of ALS is still u...

A matroid is a notion of independence in combinatorial optimization which is closely related to computational efficiency. In particular, it is well known that the maximum of a constrained modular function can be found greedily if and only if the constraints are associated with a matroid. In this paper, we bring together the ideas of bandits and matroids, and propose a new class of combinatorial...

The paper presents an approach for the monitoring and diagnosis of multi-agent systems where mobile robotic agents provide services and partial observability of the environment is achieved via a set of fixed sensors. This kind of systems exhibits complex dynamics where weakly predictable interactions among agents may arise. A model-based approach to on-line monitoring and diagnosis is adopted: ...

In this study, a numerical simulation method was employed to investigate and analyze superstructure fiber Bragg gratings (SFBGs) with five duty cycles (50%, 33.33%, 14.28%, 12.5%, and 10%). This study focuses on demonstrating the relevance between design period and spectral characteristics of SFBGs (in the form of graphics) for SFBGs of all duty cycles. Compared with complicated and hard-to-lea...

The next step in the purification involved degradation of the glycogen in the proteinglycogen complex, in order to solubilize the various enzyme activities. This was achieved for glycogen synthase by incubation of the complex with 0.5~-potassium phosphate and 5 mM-AMP, which activates the endogenous phosphorylase that is present in the complex (Nimmo et al., 1976), followed by extensive dialysi...

A deregulation of ceramide biosynthesis in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is frequently linked to induction of mitochondrial apoptosis. Although in vitro studies suggest that ceramides might initiate cell death by acting directly on mitochondria, their actual contribution to the apoptotic response in living cells is unclear. Here, we have analyzed the consequences of targeting the biosynthetic ...