631 research outputs found
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Effects of freezing and cold acclimation on the plasma membrane of isolated protoplasts
Our goal is to provide a mechanistic understanding of the cellular and molecular aspects of freezing injury and cold acclimation from a perspective of the structural and functional integrity of the plasma membrane -- the primary site of freezing injury in winter cereals. We have utilized protoplasts isolated from leaves of winter rye (Secale cereale L. cv Puma) to study the cryobehavior of the plasma membrane during a freeze/thaw cycle. The focus of our current studies is on lesions in the plasma membrane that result from severe freeze-induced dehydration and result in the alteration of the semipermeable characteristics of the plasma membrane so that the protoplasts are osmotically unresponsive. In protoplasts isolated from non-acclimated rye leaves (NA protoplasts), injury is associated with the formation of aparticulate domains in the plasma membrane, aparticulate lamellae subtending the plasma membrane, and lamellar-to-hexagonal II phase transitions in the plasma membrane and the subtending lamellae. However, lamellar-to-hexagonal II phase transitions are not observed following severe dehydration of protoplasts isolated from cold-acclimated rye leaves (ACC protoplasts). Rather, injury is associated with the fracture-jump lesion,'' which, in freeze-fracture electron microscopy studies, is manifested as localized deviations in the fracture face of the plasma membrane. The fracture plane jumps'' from the plasma membrane to either subtending aparticulate lamellae or aparticulate regions of various endomembranes (predominantly chloroplast envelopes) that are in close apposition with the plasma membrane
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A parallelized disjunctive query based searchable encryption scheme for big data
Searchable Encryption (SE) allows a client to search over large amounts of encrypted data outsourced to the Cloud. Although, this helps to maintain the confidentiality of the outsourced data but achieving privacy is a difficult and resource intensive task. With the increase in the query effectiveness, i.e., by shifting from single keyword SE to multi-keyword SE there is a notable drop in the efficiency. This motivates to make use of the advances in the multi-core architectures and multiple threads where the search can be delegated across different threads to perform search in a parallel fashion. The proposed scheme is based on probabilistic trapdoors that are formed by making use of the property of modular inverses. The use of probabilistic trapdoors helps resist distinguishability attacks. The rigorous security analysis helps us to appreciate the advantage of having a probabilistic trapdoor. Furthermore, to validate the performance of the proposed scheme, it is implemented and deployed onto the British Telecommunication's Public Cloud offering and tested over a real speech corpus. The implementation is also extended to anticipate the performance gain by using the multi-core architecture that helps to maintain the lightweight property of the scheme
Water stress is a component of cold acclimation process essential for inducing full freezing tolerance in strawberry
The factors involved in cold acclimation process and their role in inducing freezing tolerance were studied in strawberry (Fragaria X ananassa) plants. The results show that low temperature and water stress are two key components of cold acclimation, in that low temperature typically induced water stress in the plants. After a 2-week exposure of plants to 3/1°C (day/night temperature), the leaf water potential decreased markedly to below -1.6 MPa. While both of these components contribute significantly to the induction of freezing tolerance, water stress is a dominant factor in inducing freezing tolerance, contributing roughly to 56% of freezing tolerance acquired by natural cold acclimation. Typical cold acclimation treatment of plants for 2 weeks increased their freezing tolerance by about 14°C to -20.7°C while the same treatment, in the absence of the accompanying water stress, increased their freezing tolerance only by 5°C, which indicates the importance of water stress during cold acclimation. Furthermore, both low temperature and water stress independently induced the orthologs of cold-responsive genes, COR47 and COR78, however, stronger expression of these genes was observed in response to cold acclimating conditions. Thus, these results show that both of these factors are essential elements of cold acclimation process and play an important role in inducing freezing tolerance in strawberry plants
3D imaging of biofilms on implants by detection of scattered light with a scanning laser optical tomograph
Biofilms – communities of microorganisms attached to surfaces – are a constant threat for long-term success in modern implantology. The application of laser scanning microscopy (LSM) has increased the knowledge about microscopic properties of biofilms, whereas a 3D imaging technique for the large scale visualization of bacterial growth and migration on curved and non-transparent surfaces is not realized so far
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