Starch branching enzyme was purified from potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) tubers as a single species of 79 kilodaltons and specific antibodies were prepared against both the native enzyme and against the gel-purified, denatured enzyme. The activity of potato branching enzyme could only be neutralized by antinative potato branching enzyme, whereas both types of antibodies reacted with denatured po...

Photosynthesis evolved in eukaryotes by the endosymbiosis of a cyanobacterium, the future plastid, within a heterotrophic host. This primary endosymbiosis occurred in the ancestor of Archaeplastida, a eukaryotic supergroup that includes glaucophytes, red algae, green algae, and land plants [1-4]. However, although the endosymbiotic origin of plastids from a single cyanobacterial ancestor is fir...

Computer Scrabble programs have achieved a level of performance that exceeds that of the strongest human players. MAVEN was the first program to demonstrate this against human opposition. Scrabble is a game of imperfect information with a large branching factor. The techniques successfully applied in two-player games such as chess do not work here. MAVEN combines a selective move generator, sim...

A general and important problem of search-based planning techniques is the state explosion problem, which is usually tackled with approaches to reduce the branching factor of the planning task. Such approaches often implicitly exploit the observation that the number of available operators is higher than the number of operators that are actually needed to find a plan. In this paper, we propose a...

For the critical branching random walk in Z 4 with branching at the origin only we find the asymptotic behavior of the probability of the event that there are particles at the origin at moment t → ∞ and prove a Yaglom type conditional limit theorem for the number of individuals at the origin given that there are particles at the origin.

Although game-tree search works well in perfect-information games, it is less suitable for imperfect-information games such as contract bridge. The lack of knowledge about the opponents' possible moves gives the game tree a very large branching factor, making it impossible to search a signiicant portion of this tree in a reasonable amount of time. This paper describes our approach for overcomin...

Branching morphogenesis is an important developmental process for many organs, including the salivary glands. Whereas epithelial-mesenchymal interactions, which are cell-to-cell communications, are known to drive branching morphogenesis, the molecular mechanisms responsible for those inductive interactions are still largely unknown. Cell growth factors and integrins are known to be regulators o...

In this paper we introduce the notion of classical quasi-primary submodules that generalizes the concept of classical primary submodules. Then, we investigate decomposition and minimal decomposition into classical quasi-primary submodules. In particular, existence and uniqueness of classical quasi-primary decompositions in finitely generated modules over Noetherian rings are proved. More...

Truffles are symbiotic fungi that form ectomycorrhizas with plant roots. Here we present evidence that at an early stage of the interaction, i.e. prior to physical contact, mycelia of the white truffle Tuber borchii and the black truffle Tuber melanopsorum induce alterations in root morphology of the host Cistus incanus and the nonhost Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana; i.e. primary root shorte...