Cholesterol is a major and essential constituent in higher eukaryotic cellular membranes and is crucial in membrane organization, dynamics, function, and sorting (Liscum and Underwood 1995 ; Simons and Ikonen 2000 ; Mouritsen and Zuckermann 2004 ) . Cholesterol is a predominantly hydrophobic molecule comprising a near planar tetracyclic fused steroid ring and a fl exible isooctyl hydrocarbon ta...

Asymmetric Conjugate Addition of ortho-Quinone Methides as a Pathway to the Core of Nomofungin Introduction: Tetracyclic structures are found at the core of many biologically active molecules. One class of compounds with a tetracyclic core is the family of communesin products. 1 These products have shown cytotoxicity against several leukemia cell lines as well as insecticidal activity against s...

We consider an edge-isoperimetric problem (EIP) on the cartesian powers of graphs. One of our objectives is to extend the list of graphs for whose cartesian powers the lexicographic order provides nested solutions for the EIP. We present several new classes of such graphs that include as special cases all presently known graphs with this property. Our new results are applied to derive best poss...

We introduce nite relational structures called sketches, that represent edge crossings in drawings of nite graphs. We consider the problem of characterizing sketches in Monadic Second-Order logic. We answer positively the question for framed sketches, i.e., for those representing drawings of graphs consisting of a planar connected spanning subgraph (the frame) augmented with additional edges th...

Let c : E(G) → [k] be an edge-coloring of a graph G, not necessarily proper. For each vertex v, let c̄(v) = (a1, . . . , ak), where ai is the number of edges incident to v with color i. Reorder c̄(v) for every v in G in nonincreasing order to obtain c∗(v), the color-blind partition of v. When c∗ induces a proper vertex coloring, that is, c∗(u) 6= c∗(v) for every edge uv in G, we say that c is col...

We examine the simultaneous embedding with fixed edges problem for two planar graphs G1 and G2 with the focus on their intersection S = G1∩G2. In particular, we will present the complete set of intersection graphs S that guarantee a simultaneous embedding with fixed edges for (G1, G2). More formally, we define the subset ISEFE of all planar graphs as follows: A graph S lies in ISEFE if every pa...

We prove that the unique decomposition of connected graphs defined by Tutte is definable by formulas of Monadic Second-Order Logic. This decomposition has two levels: every connected graph is a tree of "2-connected components" called blocks ; every 2-connected graph is a tree of so-called 3-blocks. Our proof uses 2dags which are certain acyclic orientations of the considered graphs. We obtain a...

The rank-width is a graph parameter related in terms of fixed functions to cliquewidth but more tractable. Clique-width has nice algorithmic properties, but no good “minor” relation is known analogous to graph minor embedding for tree-width. In this paper, we discuss the vertex-minor relation of graphs and its connection with rank-width. We prove a relationship between vertex-minors of bipartit...

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