Latex is the milky sap that is found in many different plants. It is produced by specialized cells known as laticifers and can comprise a mixture of proteins, carbohydrates, oils, secondary metabolites, and rubber that may help to prevent herbivory and protect wound sites against infection. The wound-induced browning of latex suggests that it contains one or more phenol-oxidizing enzymes. Here,...

Background: BAC clones containing entire mammalian genes including all the transcribed region and long range controlling elements are very useful for functional analysis. Sequenced BACs are available for most of the human and mouse genomes and in many cases these contain intact genes. However, large genes often span more than one BAC, and single BACs covering the entire region of interest are n...

Protoporphyrinogen IX oxidase (PPO) catalyzes the last common step in chlorophyll and heme synthesis, and ferrochelatase (FeC) catalyzes the last step of the heme synthesis pathway. In plants, each of these two enzymes is encoded by two or more genes, and the enzymes have been reported to be located in the chloroplasts or in the mitochondria. We report that in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinh...

Plant polyphenol oxidases (PPOs) are ubiquitous plastid-localized enzymes. A precise analysis of PPO function in plants has been complicated by the presence of several family members with immunological cross reactivity. Previously we reported the isolation of genomic clones coding for the seven members of the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) PPO family (A, A', B, C, D, E, and F). Here we report th...

Polyphenol oxidase (PPO) activity in potato (Solanum tuberosum) plants was high in stolons, tubers, roots, and flowers but low in leaves and stems. PPO activity per tuber continued to increase throughout tuber development but was highest on a fresh weight basis in developing tubers. PPO activity was greatest at the tuber exterior, including the skin and cortex tissue 1 to 2 mm beneath the skin....

Alternate strategies for prevention of enzymatic browning of fruits and vegetables are required by food industries due to restrictions and several negative health attributes of sulphites, which are effective inhibitors of enzymatic browning reaction. These reactions result mostly from polyphenol oxidase (PPO). The present study was conducted to evaluate the antioxidant and PPO inhibitory potent...

Cost-effective plug-and-play optical (PPO) nodes may enable a new generation of self-configuring and simple-to-deploy optical networks. Three possible PPO node architectures are discussed in the paper along with their built-in opitcal fiber characterization techniques. Introduction The deployment of optical networks is in part delayed by two factors: the excessive cost of optical node equipment...

Herbicides that act by inhibiting protoporphyrinogen oxidase (PPO) are widely used to control weeds in a variety of crops. The first weed to evolve resistance to PPO-inhibiting herbicides was Amaranthus tuberculatus, a problematic weed in the midwestern United States that previously had evolved multiple resistances to herbicides inhibiting two other target sites. Evaluation of a PPO-inhibitor-r...

An epoxy based on the diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A (DGEBA) has been modified with poly(phenylene oxide) (PPO) and cured with piperidine. A two-phase alloy resulted, in which the DGEBA epoxy was the continuous phase. Several PPO loadings were investigated. The tensile yield strengths of these PPO-modified epoxies were found to be independent of PPO content. In contrast, the fracture toughness...

Small-angle neutron scattering and mean-field lattice modeling were used to characterize a class of water-based magnetic fluids tailored specifically to extract soluble organic compounds from water. The fluids consist of a suspension of approximately 7 nm magnetite (Fe3O4) nanoparticles coated with a bifunctional polymer layer comprised of an outer hydrophilic poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) region ...