The increase in soil salinity poses a serious threat to agricultural yields. Under salinity stress, several Na⁺ transporters play an essential role in Na⁺ tolerance in plants. Amongst all Na+ transporters, HKT has been shown to have a crucial role in both mono and dicotyledonous plants in the tolerance to salinity stress. Here we present an overview of the physiological role of HKT transporters...

Salt tolerance of plants depends on HKT transporters (High-affinity K(+) Transporter), which mediate Na(+)-specific transport or Na(+)-K(+) co-transport. Gene sequences closely related to rice HKT genes were isolated from hexaploid bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) or barley (Hordeum vulgare) for genomic DNA southern hybridization analysis. HKT gene sequences were mapped on chromosomal arms of wh...

Human lung tumor-derived cell lines with low passage generation were transplanted into nude mice to determine their growth behavior and invasive potential. Six cell lines (HKT-2, HKT-3, HKT-5, HKT-6, HKT-7, HKT-8) were inoculated into deepithelialized rat trachea (5 x 10(5) cells/trachea). After cell inoculation, the tracheas were sealed and transplanted into the subcutis of nude mice. In a par...

A manifold (M, I, J,K) is called hypercomplex if I, J,K are complex structures satisfying quaternionic relations. A quaternionic Hermitian hypercomplex manifold is called HKT (hyperkähler with torsion) if the (2,0)-form Ω associated with the corresponding Sp(n)-structure satisfies ∂Ω = 0. A Hermitian metric ω on a complex manifold is called balanced if d∗ω = 0. We show that balanced HKT metrics...

We study HKT structures on nilpotent Lie groups and on associated nilmanifolds. We exhibit three weak HKT structures on R which are homogeneous with respect to extensions of Heisenberg type Lie groups. The corresponding hypercomplex structures are of a special kind, called abelian. We prove that on any 2-step nilpotent Lie group all invariant HKT structures arise from abelian hypercomplex struc...

BACKGROUND Health literacy affects the acquisition of health knowledge and is thus linked to health outcomes. However, few scales have been developed to assess the level of health knowledge among the general public. METHODS The 15-item Japanese Health Knowledge Test (J-HKT) was developed by using item response theory to score an item pool. We examined the construct validity of the J-HKT in re...

The target space of a (4,0) supersymmetric two-dimensional sigma model with Wess-Zumino term has a connection with totally skew-symmetric torsion and holonomy contained in Sp(n)Sp(1) (resp. Sp(n)), QKT (resp. HKT)-spaces. We study the geometry of QKT, HKT manifold and their twistor spaces. We show that the Swann bundle of a QKT manifold admits a HKT structure with special symmetry if and only i...

Members of class II of the HKT transporters, which have thus far only been isolated from grasses, were found to mediate Na(+)-K(+) cotransport and at high Na(+) concentrations preferred Na(+)-selective transport, depending on the ionic conditions. But the physiological functions of this K(+)-transporting class II of HKT transporters remain unknown in plants, with the exception of the unique cla...