When plants are exposed to stressful environmental conditions, the production of Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) increases and can cause significant damage to the cells. Antioxidant defenses, which can detoxify ROS, are present in plants. A major hydrogen peroxide detoxifying system in plant cells is the ascorbate-glutathione cycle, in which, ascorbate peroxidase (APX) enzymes play a key role cat...

Discrete energy minimization is widely-used in computer vision and machine learning for problems such as MAP inference in graphical models. The problem, in general, is notoriously intractable, and finding the global optimal solution is known to be NP-hard. However, is it possible to approximate this problem with a reasonable ratio bound on the solution quality in polynomial time? We show in thi...

Ascorbate peroxidases (APX) are class I heme-containing enzymes that convert hydrogen peroxide into water molecules. The gene encoding APX has been characterized in 11 strains of Trypanosoma cruzi that are sensitive or resistant to benznidazole (BZ). Bioinformatic analysis revealed the presence of two complete copies of the T. cruzi APX (TcAPX) gene in the genome of the parasite, while karyotyp...

The peroxisomal isoform of ascorbate peroxidase (APX) is a novel membrane isoform that functions in the regeneration of NAD(+) and protection against toxic reactive oxygen species. The intracellular localization and sorting of peroxisomal APX were examined both in vivo and in vitro. Epitope-tagged peroxisomal APX, which was expressed transiently in tobacco BY-2 cells, localized to a reticular/c...

Previous studies have demonstrated that insulin and IGF-1 both increase lumbar sympathetic nerve activity (LSNA) and decrease mean arterial pressure (MAP). We hypothesized that the peripheral responses to insulin and IGF-1 are mediated, at least in part, via the central nervous system. In this study we determined the effects of the peripheral administration of both insulin and IGF-1 on cardiova...

We studied the response of each ascorbate peroxidase (APX) isoenzyme in spinach leaves under stress conditions imposed by high light intensity, drought, salinity, and applications of methyl viologen and abscisic acid. The steady-state transcript level of cytosolic APX remarkably increased in response to high-light stress and methyl viologen treatment, but not in response to the other stress tre...

Full exploitation of the bandwidth resources of Wireless Networks is challenging because of the sharing of the radio medium among neighboring nodes. Practical algorithms and distributed schemes that tries to optimising the use of the network radio resources. In this technical report we present the proof that maximising the network capacity is is an APXComplete problem (not approximable within 1...

We investigate the approximability of minimum and maximum linear ordering problems (MIN-LOP and MAX-LOP) and related feedback set problems such as maximum weight acyclic subdiagraph (MAX-W-SUBDAG), minimum weight feedback arc/vertex set (MIN-W-FAS/ MIN-W-FVS) and a generalization of the latter called MIN-Subset-FAS/MIN-Subset-FVS. MAX-LOP and the other problems have been studied by many researc...

We reported that the AT1 receptor antagonist losartan decreases arterial pressure in sodium-replete rats and that this response is attenuated in area postrema-lesioned (APx) rats (J. P. Collister, B. J. Hornfeldt, and J. W. Osborn. Hypertension 27: 598-606, 1996). In that study, food intake for the 3-wk period after sham lesion was restricted to that observed in APx rats. Food-restricted sham r...