Ablation of the desmosomal plaque component plakophilin 1 underlies the autosomal recessive genodermatosis, skin fragility-ectodermal dysplasia syndrome (OMIM 604536). Skin from affected patients is thickened with increased scale, and there is loss of adhesion between adjacent keratinocytes, which exhibit few small, poorly formed desmosomes. To investigate further the influence of plakophilin 1...

Mutations destabilizing the spatial structure of proteins can persist in populations if they are fixed by drift or compensated by other mutations. The prevalence and dynamics of these processes remain largely unrecognized. A suitable target to screen for both deleterious and compensatory mutations is the URA3 gene in yeast. We identified 13 positions in which a single missense substitution caus...

The basidiomycetous yeast genus Cryptococcus contains two medically important pathogens, Cryptococcus neoformans and C. gattii [1-3]. C. neoformans is one of the common pathogens in acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), whereas the most cases of diseases due to C. gattii happened in the healthy individuals [2, 4]. C. gattii has a tendency to affect the respiratory and nervous systems of th...

Abstract. In this paper we consider the transmission problem of a material composed of three components; one of them is a Kelvin–Voigt viscoelastic material, the second is an elastic material (no dissipation), and the third is an elastic material inserted with a frictional damping mechanism. The main result of this paper is that the rate of decay will depend on the position of each component. W...

Variation in response styles in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis are known to be predictors of short- and long-term health outcomes. The nature of HPA responses to stressors changes with developmental stage, and some components of the stress response exhibit long-term individual consistency (i.e., are trait-like) while others are transient or variable (i.e., state-like). Here we ev...

The origin of analcite-bearing lavas and potassic volcanic rocks is controversial in the geological record. Two main hypotheses are either primary analcite or replacement pseudomorphous of leucite. Spectacular large (5 cm) euhedral trapezohedra occur as single crystals of analcite in tephriphonolite lavas from Nadik area. Based on the following evidences the large analcite trapezohedra from Nad...