In rats, water deprivation (WD) increases arterial blood pressure (BP) in part due to actions of elevated osmolality in the brain to increase vasopressin levels and sympathetic activity. However, the osmoreceptors that mediate this response have not been identified. To test the hypothesis that osmoregulatory circumventricular organs are involved, BP and heart rate (HR) were continuously recorde...

In this note we investigate the complexity of the Minimum Label Alignment problem and we show that such a problem is APX-hard.

Given two comparative maps, that is two sequences of markers each representing a genome, the Maximal Strip Recovery problem (MSR) asks to extract a largest sequence of markers from each map such that the two extracted sequences are decomposable into non-intersecting strips (or synteny blocks). This aims at defining a robust set of synteny blocks between different species, which is a key to unde...

Given an n-vertex graph G = (V,E) and a set R ⊆ {{x, y} | x, y ∈ V } of requests, we consider to assign a set of edges to each vertex in G so that for every request {u, v} in R the union of the edge sets assigned to u and v contains a path from u to v. The Minimum Certificate Dispersal Problem (MCD) is defined as one to find an assignment that minimizes the sum of the cardinality of the edge se...

Weconsider a variant of the graph searching games thatmodels the routing reconfiguration problem in WDM networks. In the digraph processing game, a team of agents aims at processing, or clearing, the vertices of a digraph D. We are interested in two different measures: (1) the total number of agents used, and (2) the total number of vertices occupied by an agent during the processing of D. Thes...

A cycle cover of a graph is a set of cycles such that every vertex is part of exactly one cycle. An L-cycle cover is a cycle cover in which the length of every cycle is in the set L. A special case of L-cycle covers are k-cycle covers for k ∈ N, where the length of each cycle must be at least k. The weight of a cycle cover of an edge-weighted graph is the sum of the weights of its edges. We com...

This study tests the hypothesis that the area postrema (AP) is necessary for endogenous ANG II to chronically maintain lumbar sympathetic nerve activity (LSNA) and heart rate (HR) in conscious sodium-deprived rats. The effect of the ANG II type 1-receptor antagonist, losartan, on LSNA and HR was determined in rats that were either AP lesioned (APX) or sham lesioned. The sham rats were divided i...

Robustness to mutations is a general principle of biological systems that allows for the accumulation of cryptic variation. However, little is known about robustness and cryptic variation in core developmental pathways. Here we show through gonad-ablation screens in natural isolates of Pristionchus pacificus cryptic variation in nematode vulva development. This variation is mainly caused by cis...

In this study, the effects of Funelliformis mosseae and Piriformospora indica on wheat growth, enzyme activity and gene expression of catalase (CAT), ascorbate peroxidase (APX) and glutathione S-transferase (GST) in wheat leaves under different cadmium (Cd) toxicity were investigated. Cd exposure reduced plant dry mass and enzyme activities of CAT and APX, but it increased GST activity. The pre...

Area postrema lesions (APX) in adult male rats produced a robust spontaneous intake of 0.5 M NaCl, as reported previously. The largest NaCl intakes (up to 108 ml/day) were observed when there was little incidental damage in the medial subnucleus of the nucleus of the solitary tract adjacent to the caudal and middle portions of the area postrema. Rats with discrete APX also drank substantial amo...