An Escherichia coli expression system has been developed for pea cytosolic ascorbate peroxidase (APX). The enzyme was expressed as a fusion product with the E. coli maltose-binding protein for rapid, affinity chromatography purification. Recombinant ascorbate peroxidase (rAPX) was purified by tryptic digestion to separate the maltose-binding protein from rAPX followed by three chromatographic s...

The effects of exogenous ascorbic acid (AsA) and reduced glutathione (GSH) on antioxidant enzyme activities [superoxide dismutase (SOD), ascorbate peroxidase (APX), and glutathione reductase (GR)] and the contents of malondialdehyde (MDA) and H2O2, as well as of endogenous AsA and GSH, in the chloroplasts of two rice cultivars, the salt-tolerant cultivar Pokkali and the salt-sensitive cultivar ...

The Maximum Independent Set problem in d-box graphs, i.e., in intersection graphs of axis-parallel rectangles in Rd, is known to be NP-hard for any fixed d ≥ 2. A challenging open problem is, how close the solution can be approximated by a polynomial time algorithm. For the restricted case of d-boxes with bounded aspect ratio a PTAS exists [12]. In general case no polynomial time algorithm with...

We consider the unit-demand envy-free pricing problem, which is a unit-demand auction where each bidder receives an item that maximizes his utility, and the goal is to maximize the auctioneer’s profit. This problem is NP-hard and unlikely to be in APX. We present four new MIP formulations for it and experimentally compare them to a previous one due to Shioda, Tunçel, and Myklebust. We describe ...

Salinity is a major environmental stress that limits crop production worldwide. In this study, we characterized plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) containing 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate (ACC) deaminase and examined their effect on salinity stress tolerance in okra through the induction of ROS-scavenging enzyme activity. PGPR inoculated okra plants exhibited higher germination per...

We consider the approximability of the Unsplittable Flow Problem (UFP) on tree graphs, and give a deterministic quasi-polynomial time approximation scheme for the problem when the number of leaves in the tree graph is at most poly-logarithmic in n (the number of demands), and when all edge capacities and resource requirements are suitably bounded. Our algorithm generalizes a recent technique th...

Ascorbate peroxidase (APX) is a crucial, haeme-containing enzyme of the ascorbate glutathione cycle that detoxifies reactive oxygen species in plants by catalyzing the conversion of hydrogen peroxide to water using ascorbate as a specific electron donor. Different APX isoforms are present in discrete subcellular compartments in rice and their expression is stress regulated. We revealed the homo...

We study the approximation complexity of the Metric Dimension problem in bounded degree, dense as well as in general graphs. For the general case, we prove that the Metric Dimension problem is not approximable within (1 − ǫ) lnn for any ǫ > 0, unless NP ⊆ DTIME(nlog logn), and we give an approximation algorithm which matches the lower bound. Even for bounded degree instances it is APX-hard to d...

We study the minimum connected sensor cover problem (MIN-CSC) and the budgeted connected sensor cover (Budgeted-CSC) problem, both motivated by important applications (e.g., reduce the communication cost among sensors) in wireless sensor networks. In both problems, we are given a set of sensors and a set of target points in the Euclidean plane. In MIN-CSC, our goal is to find a set of sensors o...