Intracellular membrane fusion requires the regulated assembly of SNARE (soluble N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor (NSF) attachment protein receptor) proteins anchored in the apposed membranes. To exert the force required to drive fusion between lipid bilayers, juxtamembrane SNARE motifs zipper into four-helix bundles. Importantly, SNARE function is regulated by additional factors, none more ext...

Elastic energy is critical for amplifying muscle power during the propulsive phase of anuran jumping. In this study, we use toads (Bufo marinus) to address whether elastic recoil is also involved after take-off to help flex the limbs before landing. The potential for such spring-like behaviour stems from the unusually flexed configuration of a toad's hindlimbs in a relaxed state. Manual extensi...

─ Future wireless communication devices are expected to support a broad range of exciting applications, while coping with stringent energy budget requirements. Delivering at each moment in time the just required performance with minimal energy consumption is a promising energy management technique to enable pervasive wireless networking. Considering transmission energy only, the use of multiple...

In the degradative pathway, the progression of cargos through endosomal compartments involves a series of fusion and maturation events. The HOPS (homotypic fusion and protein sorting) complex is part of the machinery that promotes the progression from early to late endosomes and lysosomes by regulating the exchange of small GTPases. We report that an interaction between subunits of the HOPS com...

Biochemical and structural analysis of macromolecular protein assemblies remains challenging due to technical difficulties in recombinant expression, engineering and reconstitution of multisubunit complexes. Here we use a recently developed cell-free protein expression system based on the protozoan Leishmania tarentolae to produce in vitro all six subunits of the 600 kDa HOPS and CORVET membran...

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is a promising solution for all optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks. It combines the benefits of both Optical Packet Switching (OPS) and Optical Circuit Switching (OCS). In this switching, data are transmitted in the form of bursts. Fairness is the main constraint in high-performance OBS network. In order to improve the fairness, a method known ...

We propose Fast Flooding in Power Save Mode (FFPSM), a modification of IEEE 802.11 power save mode operation for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANET). The previous works for the power save mode operation usually focused on shortening the duration of the awake state to minimize the power consumption of mobile nodes. We observed that the longer sleeping period results in seriously long delivery latency...

Rab GTPases and their effectors mediate docking, the initial contact of intracellular membranes preceding bilayer fusion. However, it has been unclear whether Rab proteins and effectors are sufficient for intermembrane interactions. We have recently reported reconstituted membrane fusion that requires yeast vacuolar SNAREs, lipids, and the homotypic fusion and vacuole protein sorting (HOPS)/cla...

Virtual network mapping is one of the main problems in network virtualization. At present, virtual networking mapping aims at minimal resource consumption at substrate network, but ignores the resource demanded by the hidden hops, making bottlenecks due to the resource shortage at the hidden hops. This paper aims at the simultaneous loading balance of the substrate node and the substrate link, ...

Executing walks in partitioned, distributed graphs with minimal latency requires reducing the number of network hops taken. This is especially important for graph databases that specialize on executing fast graph traversals. We present fast-forward-search, an algorithm that uses overlapping graph partitionings, i.e. replication, and parallel speculative execution to minimize the number of requi...