The two-electron ubiquinol oxidation or ubiquinone reduction typically involves semiquinone (SQ) intermediates. Natural engineering of ubiquinone binding sites of bioenergetic enzymes secures that SQ is sufficiently stabilized, so that it does not leave the site to membranous environment before full oxidation/reduction is completed. The ubiquinol oxidation Qo site of cytochrome bc1 (mitochondri...

The plant Dioscorea composita has important applications in the medical and energy industries, and can be used for the extraction of steroidal sapogenins (important raw materials for the synthesis of steroidal drugs) and bioethanol production. However, little is known at the genetic level about how sapogenins are biosynthesized in this plant. Using Illumina deep sequencing, 62,341 unigenes were...

-Residual vector quantizatlon (RVQ), or multistage VQ, as it is also called, has recently been shown to be a competitive technique for data compression [1]. The competitive performance of RVQ reported in [1] results from the joint optimization of variable rate encoding and RVQ direct-sum codebooks. In this paper, necessary conditions for the optimality of variable rate RVQs are derived, and an ...

— Task scheduling and execution over large scale, distributed systems plays an important role on achieving good performance and high system utilization. Job management systems need to support applications (e.g. Many-Task Computing – MTC, MapReduce) with a growing number of tasks with finer granularity due to the explosion of parallelism found in today's hardware which requires techniques such a...

Density functional theory (DFT) calculations have been performed on A(2+)B2(3+)O4(2-) (where A(2+) = Fe, Ni or Zn, and B(3+) = Fe or Cr) spinel oxides in order to determine some of their thermodynamic properties. Mixing energies were calculated for Fe3O4-NiFe2O4, Fe3O4-ZnFe2O4, Fe3O4-FeCr2O4, NiFe2O4-ZnFe2O4, NiFe2O4-NiCr2O4, FeCr2O4-NiCr2O4, FeCr2O4-ZnCr2O4 and ZnCr2O4-ZnFe2O4 pseudo-binaries ...

About one-third of the world's rice area is in rain-fed lowlands and most are prone to water shortage. The identification of genes imparting tolerance to drought in the model cereal plant, rice, is an attractive strategy to engineer improved drought tolerance not only rice but other cereals as well. It is demonstrated that RNAi-mediated disruption of a rice farnesyltransferase/squalene synthase...

The reaction catalyzed by squalene synthase (EC.2.5.1.21) that converts two molecules of farnesyl pyrophosphate to squalene represents a crucial branch point of the isoprenoid pathway in diverting carbon flux towards the biosynthesis of sterols. In the present study two soybean squalene synthase genes, GmSQS1 and GmSQS2, were identified in the soybean genome and functionally characterized for t...

High-entropy materials, for both complexity in structure and superiority performance, have been widely confirmed to be one possible kind of advanced electrocatalyst. Significant efforts dedicated modeling the atomic-level details high-entropy catalysts improve viability bottom-up design electrocatalysts. In this review, first, we survey developments various methods that are based on density fun...

Performance of AO systems on ELTs depends not just on seeing; other parameters such as strength of high-altitude turbulence are more relevant for the laser tomography. Nights good for some instruments are not so good for others, so there is a clear advantage to go from the simple queue scheduling on seeing to a more complex strategy of selecting in a multi-parameter space. The need to know thos...

Four of five software metrics programs fail [Pitt97]. On the other side many software projects fail because of budget or time overruns [Glas02]. From the technical point of view metrics can be applied to every system to get insights about the quality of large software systems. There exist many metrics, metric sets and metrics tools (cf. e.g. [Simo01]). Additionally there exist many studies on p...