BACKGROUND Biologically produced alkanes can be used as 'drop in' to existing transportation infrastructure as alkanes are important components of gasoline and jet fuels. Despite the reported microbial production of alkanes, the toxicity of alkanes to microbial hosts could pose a bottleneck for high productivity. In this study, we aimed to improve the tolerance of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a mo...

Multivalent binding allows high selectivity and affinity in a ligand-protein interaction. The N-end rule pathway is a ubiquitin (Ub)-dependent proteolytic system in which specific E3s, called N-recognins, mediate ubiquitylation through the recognition of types 1 and 2, destabilizing N-terminal residues of substrates. We recently identified a set of E3 Ub ligases (named UBR1-UBR7) containing the...

We give a brief survey of the main results of [C04] and [C11], devoted to the bimeromorphic structure of compact Kähler manifolds X. Such manifolds are decomposed by means of iterated fibrations into elementary components, which are orbifold pairs with a canonical bundle either positive, negative, or torsion. Towers of ‘torsion and negative’ components build however the new (unconditional) clas...

Let σ be a constant in the interval (0, 1), and let A be an infinite set of positive integers which contains at least c1x σ and at most c2x σ elements in the interval [1, x] for some constants c2 > c1 > 0 independent of x and each x ≥ x0. We prove that then the sumset A + A has more elements than A (counted up to x) by a factor c(σ) √ log x/ log log x for x large enough. An example showing that...

What determines the direction of spread of currency crises? We examine data on waves of currency crises in 1992, 1994, 1997, and 1998 to evaluate several hypotheses on the determinants of contagion. We simultaneously consider trade competition, financial links, and institutional similarity to the “ground-zero” country as potential drivers of contagion. To overcome data limitations and account f...

It follows that there is a positive constant c1 and arbitrarily large values of x for which the interval (x; x+ c1x ] contains no squarefull numbers. On the other hand, since there is a square in (x; x + 2 p x + 1] for all x 0, it follows that there is a constant c2 such that for every x 1, the interval (x; x + c2x] contains a squarefull number. Thus, the order of the maximum size of gaps betwe...

Divergent natural selection caused by differences in solar exposure has resulted in distinctive variations in skin color between human populations. The derived light skin color allele of the SLC24A5 gene, A111T, predominates in populations of Western Eurasian ancestry. To gain insight into when and where this mutation arose, we defined common haplotypes in the genomic region around SLC24A5 acro...

There is growing evidence that amorphous silica nanoparticles cause toxic effects on lung cells in vivo as well as in vitro and induce inflammatory processes. The phagocytosis of silica by alveolar macrophages potentiates these effects. To understand the underlying molecular mechanisms of silica toxicity, we applied a co-culture system including the immortal alveolar epithelial mouse cell line ...