2D Nanoclay for Biomedical Applications: Regenerative Medicine,Therapeutic Delivery,and Additive Manufacturing

Clay nanomaterials are an emerging class of 2D biomaterials of interest due to their atomically thin layered structure, charged characteristics, and well‐defined composition. Synthetic nanoclays are plate‐like polyions composed of simple or complex salts of silicic acids with a heterogeneous charge distribution and patchy interactions. Due to their biocompatible characteristics, unique shape, high surface‐to‐volume ratio, and charge, nanoclays are investigated for various biomedical applications. Here, a critical overview of the physical, chemical, and physiological interactions of nanoclay with biological moieties, including cells, proteins, and polymers, is provided. The state‐of‐the‐art biomedical applications of 2D nanoclay in regenerative medicine, therapeutic delivery, and additive manufacturing are reviewed. In addition, recent developments that are shaping this emerging field are discussed and promising new research directions for 2D nanoclay‐based biomaterials are identified.     

Protease Inhibitors of Chickpea (Cicer arietinumL) During Seed Development

Developing seeds of two chickpea varieties were collected on the 20th, 40th and 60th day after flowering (DAF) and analysed for trypsin inhibitors (TI). The varieties differed in their TI profiles and activity units. The TI band and activity were not detectable at 20 DAF in the varieties Annigeri and BDN 9-3. Annigeri showed the highest total and specific TI activity, and five isoinhibitors at 40 DAF, which decreased to four at 60 DAF. The appearance and disappearance of TI bands during seed development indicate their specific post-translational modification and/or the presence of isolated gene groups. © 1997 SCI.     

Functional and bioinformatic characterisation of sequence variants of Fad3 gene from flax

BACKGROUND: Desaturases are enzymes that drive the multi‐step fatty acid biosynthetic pathway. As evident from directed mutagenesis, single base changes in their polypeptide can potentially alter their structure and may result in altered substrate specificity, regioselectivity and even loss of function. The authors have previously isolated several sequence variants of Δ15 desaturase from flax while attempting to clone that gene. The aim of the present study was to analyse these gene variants for their functionality and to predict the tertiary structure of the protein in order to correlate the functional differences with the protein structure. RESULTS: The variants differed in the rate at which they could convert linoleic acid to α‐linolenic acid. The highest conversion rate was 7.03%, while the lowest was 2.39%. The overall shape of the predicted 3D model of the protein is a compact cylinder containing α‐helices and β‐sheets. The Ramchandran plot of this model revealed that 98.5% of the residues are located in allowed region, which denotes a stable structure. CONCLUSION: Although the structures of the variants are apparently similar, subtle changes account for variation in their activity. Besides, these substitutions may alter their cross‐talk with other proteins and thus differentially influence their specificity, localisation and stability, which in turn may explain the diversity in their function. Copyright © 2011 Society of Chemical Industry     

Evolution of Texture,Grain Boundary Constitution,Strain, and Corrosion Behavior of Electrodeposited Ni–P Coatings as a Function of Deposition Current Density

Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A - Ni–P coatings with low P content (P wt pct < 1.0) were fabricated at different applied current densities of electrodeposition...     

A self‐organized resource allocation scheme for heterogeneous macro‐femto networks

This paper investigates the radio resource management (RRM) issues in a heterogeneous macro‐femto network. The objective of femto deployment is to improve coverage, capacity, and experienced quality of service of indoor users. The location and density of user‐deployed femtos is not known a‐priori. This makes interference management crucial. In particular, with co‐channel allocation (to improve resource utilization efficiency), RRM becomes involved because of both cross‐layer and co‐layer interference. In this paper, we review the resource allocation strategies available in the literature for heterogeneous macro‐femto network. Then, we propose a self‐organized resource allocation (SO‐RA) scheme for an orthogonal frequency division multiple access based macro‐femto network to mitigate co‐layer interference in the downlink transmission. We compare its performance with the existing schemes like Reuse‐1, adaptive frequency reuse (AFR), and AFR with power control (one of our proposed modification to AFR approach) in terms of 10 percentile user throughput and fairness to femto users. The performance of AFR with power control scheme matches closely with Reuse‐1, while the SO‐RA scheme achieves improved throughput and fairness performance. SO‐RA scheme ensures minimum throughput guarantee to all femto users and exhibits better performance than the existing state‐of‐the‐art resource allocation schemes.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Controller design for natural and robotic systems with transmission delays

Robust stability and two‐dimensional trajectory following problems are considered for n‐link robotic systems with transmission delays. Such problems appear in telerobotics, where the controller is physically far from the robot, and in neural control of musculo‐skeletal (biological) systems, where muscle actuation and neural sensing are subject to time delays. A typical second‐order nonlinear dynamical model is taken with input and output time delays. In a prior work by the authors, a control strategy was developed for stable movement of the planar linkage system, using the standard Q‐parameterization and solving an H^∞ control problem to determine the free parameter. In this article, a new control scheme is proposed to eliminate the steady‐state errors seen in the tracking performance of the controller derived in the earlier work. Simulation examples are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control methodology. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.