Advances in Understanding Activation and Function of the NLRC4 Inflammasome

Innate immune receptors initiate a host immune response, or inflammatory response, upon detecting pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) and damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs). Among the innate immune receptors, nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain (NOD)-like receptors (NLRs) play a pivotal role in detecting cytosolic PAMPs and DAMPs. Some NLRs can form a multiprotein cytosolic complex known as the inflammasome. Inflammasome activation triggers caspase-1–mediated cleavage of the pore-forming protein gasdermin D (GSDMD), which drives a form of inflammatory cell death called pyroptosis. Parallelly, activated caspase-1 cleaves immature cytokines pro–IL-1β and pro–IL-18 into their active forms, which can be released via GSDMD membrane pores. The NLR family apoptosis inhibitory proteins (NAIP)-NLR family caspase-associated recruitment domain-containing protein 4 (NLRC4) inflammasome is important for mounting an immune response against Gram-negative bacteria. NLRC4 is activated through NAIPs sensing type 3 secretion system (T3SS) proteins from Gram-negative bacteria, such as Salmonella Typhimurium. Mutations in NAIPs and NLRC4 are linked to autoinflammatory disorders in humans. In this review, we highlight the role of the NAIP/NLRC4 inflammasome in host defense, autoinflammatory diseases, cancer, and cell death. We also discuss evidence pointing to a role of NLRC4 in PANoptosis, which was recently identified as a unique inflammatory programmed cell death pathway with important physiological relevance in a range of diseases. Improved understanding of the NLRC4 inflammasome and its potential roles in PANoptosis paves the way for identifying new therapeutic strategies to target disease.     

Development of helical coil based fluidic diode pump for liquid pumping

The main selection criterion for pumps in reprocessing applications is the absence of any moving parts or the moving parts not having any direct contact with the process fluid. There are different types of fluidic pumps such as vortex diode, reverse flow diode, etc. In this work, a new design of helical coil fluidic pump has been developed and demonstrated. Helical coils are widely used in process industries as heat exchangers, reactors, motionless mixers, etc. It is for the first time that the authors are proposing the use of helical coil as a fluidic pump based on its inherent property of high pressure drop as compared to a straight tube. The main objective of this work is to develop an alternate pumping system for reprocessing applications to replace the conventional air lift pump. The helical coil based fluidic diode pump was made up of SS 304 seamless pipe (pipe inner diameter is 9.5 mm) with a 36 mm diameter of helical coil and pitch of 14 mm. In this work, friction factor for the given helical coil was measured from pressure drop experiments. This information was also useful for understanding the transition of the laminar to turbulent region. In order to propose the operating region, the pumping capacity was measured for the helical coil based fluidic pump at different operating conditions. Experimental results show that the proposed hardware is able to pump up to 54 dm³/h. Recommendations have been made for proposing an optimum design.     

Influence of Threshold Voltage Performance Analysis on Dual Halo Gate Stacked Triple Material Dual Gate TFET for Ultra Low Power Applications

Silicon - In this article, a two dimensional (2-D) threshold voltage modeling based gate and channel engineering are developed analytically for Dual Halo Gate Stacked Triple Material Dual Gate...     

Formaldehyde vapour sensing property of electrospun NiO nanograins

Beads free polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)/NiO nanofibers with an average diameter of 400 nm were successfully prepared through the electrospinning method. NiO nanograins were formed along the axis of the nanofiber due to the calcination of as-spun fibers for 24 h at 450 °C and their presence was confirmed by FESEM. NiO nanograins were characterized by XRD, XPS and FTIR. The characterization results showed the presence of NiO in nanograins and its polycrystalline nature with ionic states. The sensing studies of NiO nanograins were performed towards the pulmonary disease breath markers and they showed better response towards formaldehyde vapour at 350 °C. Calcined NiO grains showed a good response towards the 11–1145 ppm of formaldehyde vapour at the operating temperature of 350 °C. NiO nanograins also showed quick response time (37 s) and recovery time (14 s) towards 46 ppm of formaldehyde. A sensing mechanism was proposed for the formaldehyde vapour interaction at 350 °C with NiO nanograins.     

Synthesis and characterisation of sol gel derived bioactive glass for biomedical applications

Bioactive glasses have been used successfully as bone-filling materials in orthopaedic and dental surgery, but their poor mechanical strength limits their applications in load-bearing positions. Approaches to strengthen materials decrease their bioactivity. In order to realize the optimal matching between mechanical and biological properties, the sol-gel-self propagating method is adopted to prepare gel-derived bioglass bulk: 58S in the system SiO₂–CaO–P₂O₅. The obtained glass was analysed for its composition, crystalinity and morphology through FT-IR, Raman, XRD, STEM and X-ray microanalysis.     

Hybrid BWO-IACO Algorithm for Cluster Based Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) comprises a massive number of arbitrarily placed sensor nodes that are linked wirelessly to monitor the physical parameters from the target region. As the nodes in WSN operate on inbuilt batteries, the energy depletion occurs after certain rounds of operation and thereby results in reduced network lifetime. To enhance energy efficiency and network longevity, clustering and routing techniques are commonly employed in WSN. This paper presents a novel black widow optimization (BWO) with improved ant colony optimization (IACO) algorithm (BWO-IACO) for cluster based routing in WSN. The proposed BWO-IACO algorithm involves BWO based clustering process to elect an optimal set of cluster heads (CHs). The BWO algorithm derives a fitness function (FF) using five input parameters like residual energy (RE), inter-cluster distance, intra-cluster distance, node degree (ND), and node centrality. In addition, IACO based routing process is involved for route selection in inter-cluster communication. The IACO algorithm incorporates the concepts of traditional ACO algorithm with krill herd algorithm (KHA). The IACO algorithm utilizes the energy factor to elect an optimal set of routes to BS in the network. The integration of BWO based clustering and IACO based routing techniques considerably helps to improve energy efficiency and network lifetime. The presented BWO-IACO algorithm has been simulated using MATLAB and the results are examined under varying aspects. A wide range of comparative analysis makes sure the betterment of the BWO-IACO algorithm over all the other compared techniques.     

Effect of linker structure on surface density of aptamer monolayers and their corresponding protein binding efficiency

A systematic study is reported on the effect of linker size and its chemical composition toward ligand binding to a surface-immobilized aptamer, measured using surface plasmon resonance. The results, using thrombin as the model system, showed that as the number of thymidine (T) units in the linker increases from 0 to 20 in four separate increments (T(0), T(5), T(10), T(20)), the surface density of the aptamer decreased linearly from approximately 25 to 12 pmol x cm(-2). The decrease in aptamer surface density occurred due to the increased size of the linker molecules. In addition, thrombin binding capacity was shown to increase as the linker length increased from 0 to 5 thymidine nucleotides and then decreased as the number of thymidine residues increased to 20 due to a balance between two different effects. The initial increase was due to increased access of thrombin to the aptamer as the aptamer was moved away from the surface. For linkers greater in length than T(5), the overall decrease in binding capacity was primarily due to a decrease in the surface density. Incorporation of a hexa(ethylene glycol) moiety into the linker did not affect the surface density but increased the amount of thrombin bound. In addition, the attachment of the linker at the 3'- versus the 5'-end of the aptamer resulted in increased aptamer surface density. However, monolayers formed with equal surface densities showed similar amounts of thrombin binding irrespective of the point of attachment.     

Magnetic and Magneto-Transport Measurements of 57Fe-doped SrCoO3 and Sr1?xCdxCoO3 Perovskites

In this article, the magneto-transport features of ⁵⁷Fe isotope (1%) doped SrCoO₃ (referred to as SrCo_0.99 ⁵⁷Fe_0.01O₃) perovskite compound have been investigated. The compound crystallized in cubic symmetry undergoes ferromagnetic transition around ∼270 K. The isothermal magnetization data collected at low temperature (1.8 K) indicates a characteristic of soft ferromagnet with saturation moment, M _s∼1.81 μ _B/Co. Interestingly, the electrical resistivity, ρ(T), measurements indicate semiconducting properties while metallic nature is seen for the pristine compound. The SrCo_0.99 ⁵⁷Fe_0.01O₃ sample shows temperature and field dependence of magnetoresistance, MR, around 1.5%, which is rather smaller than of the pristine perovskite. The second part of the present work reports the attempt to dope Cd on Sr-site in the perovskite structure, Sr_1−x Cd _x CoO₃, under extreme conditions. A minimum amount of about x=0.05, 0.1 is tested for solid solution in the Sr_1−x Cd _x CoO₃ structure. However, the structural data indicate that Cd is not fully doped in the matrix for x=0.05, 0.1 samples; some of the CdO is intact as an impurity and it did not show major impact on the physical properties of the samples. The ρ(T) data reveal metallic nature for both x=0.05 and 0.1 samples with relatively low resistivity at low temperature regions, and they exhibit −MR ∼4% around ∼250 K. For x=0.05 the molar magnetic susceptibility of the sample shows ferromagnetic transition at T _c=244 K, whereas x=0.1 sample exhibits ferromagnetism at T _c=264 K. The effective Bohr magnetron parameter, p _eff, determined for x=0.05 and 0.1 samples is found to be 3.10 μ _B/Co and 3.25 μ _B/Co, respectively, and these data suggest intermediate spin state for Co⁴⁺ ion for both the samples. The M(H) data for both the samples reveal soft ferromagnetism. The M _s of x=0.05 reaches 1.9 μ _B/Co and of x=0.1 reaches 1.86 μ _B/Co at 1.8 K and 70 kOe conditions.     

Impact of High Pressure and High Temperature on Annealed Oxygen-deficient CoSrO<Subscript>3−<Emphasis Type="Italic">δ</Emphasis></Subscript> Perovskites: Structural and Magnetization Studies

In this brief article, structural, magnetization studies of oxygen deficient perovskite cobalt oxides CoSrO_3?δ synthesized in two different ways are reported. The structural refinements (JANA2006) of X-ray powder diffraction data indicate that the sample prepared under ambient pressure (stage-1) shows a hexagonal structure with P6₃/mmc (194) as a possible space group. The stage-1 sample subsequently sintered at 1450?°C for 1–2 h under high-pressure 6 GPa conditions (stage-2) crystallizes in tetragonal symmetry with I4/mcm (140) space group having a=5.444(7) Å and c=7.68(2) Å. While the stage-1 sample exhibits a paramagnetic nature in the magnetic susceptibility, M(T), measurements, interestingly the sample annealed under high-pressure conditions shows ferromagnetism in the magnetic susceptibility, M(T) and field dependence magnetization, M(H) measurements. The high-pressure annealed sample shows hysteresis opening with a quite large coercive field of 7.3 kOe at 1.8 K. The temperature dependence of the inverse molar susceptibility curves exhibits linear behavior in the high-temperature regime and could be fitted to the Curie–Weiss expression, χ(T)=C/(T?θ _W). The experimental values of θ _W and p _eff obtained from the linear region of the inverse molar magnetic susceptibility curves are found to be: ?210.7(5) K and 2.38(2) μ _B/Co for stage-1 and 260.2(7) K and 1.87(3) μ _B/Co for stage-2 samples, respectively. A negative sign of θ _W indicates rather strong antiferromagnetic correlations in the stage-1 sample. Apart from these results, the structural parameters reported by various groups for the strontium-based perovskite cobalt oxides are also presented in the form of literature collections.     

Concurrent optimal allocation of geometric and process tolerances based on the present worth of quality loss using evolutionary optimisation techniques

Concurrent tolerancing becomes an optimisation problem to find out the optimum allocation of the process tolerances in the given design function constraints. In traditional optimisation methods, finding out the optimum solution for this advanced tolerance design problem is complex. The proposed algorithms (elitist non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm) and differential evolution extensively do better than the previous algorithms for attaining the optimum result. The aim of this paper is to suggest a model for optimal tolerance allocation by considering both tolerance cost and the present worth of quality loss such that the total manufacturing cost/loss is minimised. The suggested model takes into account the time value of money for quality loss and product degradation over time and consists of two new parameters: the planning horizon and the product user’s discount rate. From the outcome of this study, a longer planning horizon results in an increase in both tolerance cost and quality loss; however, a larger value of discount rate gives up a decrease in both tolerance cost and quality loss. Finally, a practical example is brought into reveal the effectiveness of the suggested method.