Review: the latest advances in biomedical applications of chitosan hydrogel as a powerful natural structure with eye-catching biological properties

Journal of Materials Science - Chitosan is one of the natural cationic polymers with unique properties such as non-toxicity, biodegradability, biocompatibility, environmentally friendly that has...     

A novel strategy based on salp swarm algorithm for extracting the maximum power of proton exchange membrane fuel cell

Cell temperature and water content of the membrane have a significant effect on the performance of fuel cells. The current-power curve of the fuel cell has a maximum power point (MPP) that is needed to be tracked. This study presents a novel strategy based on a salp swarm algorithm (SSA) for extracting the maximum power of proton-exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). At first, a new formula is derived to estimate the optimal voltage of PEMFC corresponding to MPP. Then the error between the estimated voltage at MPP and the actual terminal voltage of the fuel cell is fed to a proportional-integral-derivative controller (PID). The output of the PID controller tunes the duty cycle of a boost converter to maximize the harvested power from the PEMFC. SSA determines the optimal gains of PID. Sensitivity analysis is performed with the operating fuel cell at different cell temperature and water content of the membrane. The obtained results through the proposed strategy are compared with other programmed approaches of incremental resistance method, Fuzzy-Logic, grey antlion optimizer, wolf optimizer, and mine-blast algorithm. The obtained results demonstrated high reliability and efficiency of the proposed strategy in extracting the maximum power of the PEMFC.     

Bee Bread Ameliorates Vascular Inflammation and Impaired Vasorelaxation in Obesity-Induced Vascular Damage Rat Model: The Role of eNOS/NO/cGMP-Signaling Pathway

Obesity and hyperlipidemia are major risk factors for developing vascular diseases. Bee bread (BB) has been reported to exhibit some biological actions, including anti-obesity and anti-hyperlipidemic. This study aims to investigate whether bee bread can ameliorate vascular inflammation and impaired vasorelaxation activity through eNOS/NO/cGMP pathway in obese rats. Forty male Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into four groups (n = 10/group), namely: control (normal group), obese rats (OB group), obese rats treated with bee bread (0.5 g/kg/day, OB/BB group) and obese rats treated with orlistat (10 mg/kg/day, OB/OR group). The latter three groups were given a high-fat diet (HFD) for 6 weeks to induced obesity before being administered with their respective treatments for another 6 weeks. After 12 weeks of the total experimental period, rats in the OB group demonstrated significantly higher Lee obesity index, lipid profile (total cholesterol, triglyceride, low-density lipoprotein), aortic proinflammatory markers (tumor necrosis factor-α, nuclear factor-κβ), aortic structural damage and impairment in vasorelaxation response to acetylcholine (ACh). Bee bread significantly ameliorated the obesity-induced vascular damage manifested by improvements in the lipid profile, aortic inflammatory markers, and the impaired vasorelaxation activity by significantly enhancing nitric oxide release, promoting endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) and cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP) immunoexpression. These findings suggest that the administration of bee bread ameliorates the impaired vasorelaxation response to ACh by improving eNOS/NO/cGMP-signaling pathway in obese rats, suggesting its vascular therapeutic role.     

Structural,optical and electronic characteristics of Cu and Mg-doped nano MnS sample prepared by molten salt solid state reaction

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - Nano Mn0.95M0.05S (M ≡ Cu, Mg) samples were produced using molten salt solid state reaction method. Rietveld analysis of X-ray...     

Enhancement of glass-ceramic performance by TiO2 doping: In vitro cell viability,proliferation, and differentiation

A new TiO₂-containing bioactive glass and glass-ceramics based on 50SiO₂-(45-X)CaO-(XTiO₂)-5P₂O₅ system was designed using a sol–gel technique (where X = 5, 7.5 and 10 wt %). The roles of the crystallization behavior and physicochemical characteristics of the designed glass and glass-ceramics which were played in the introduction of TiO₂ substitutions were investigated. Moreover, cell proliferation and differentiation were evaluated against human osteosarcoma cells (Saos-2). The TiO₂/CaO replacements led to the formation of a stronger glass structure and thus increased thermal parameters and the chemical stabilization of the designed materials. The FTIR data confirmed the existence of Ti within the glass and glass-ceramics samples, and no remarkable effect on their chemical integrity was observed. The XRD patterns indicated that calcium-containing minerals, including Ca₂SiO₄,Ca₃(PO₄)₂, Ca(Ti,Si)O₅, CaTiSiO₅, and Ca₁₅(PO₄)₂·(SiO₄)₆ phases were developed as a role of structure/texture under the applied heat-treatment. The results of the cytotoxicity test proved that a safe sample dose is 12–50 μg/ml, at which cell viability is ≥ 85%. The cell differentiation determined by ALP test proved the superiority of glass-ceramics compared with their native glasses. Therefore, the obtained materials could be safely used as novel biocompatible materials for the regeneration of bone tissue.     

Maximum likelihood-based adaptive differential evolution identification algorithm for multivariable systems in the state-space form

Parameter estimation plays an important role in the field of system control. This article is concerned with the parameter estimation methods for multivariable systems in the state-space form. For the sake of solving the identification complexity caused by a large number of parameters in multivariable systems, we decompose the original multivariable system into some subsystems containing fewer parameters and study identification algorithms to estimate the parameters of each subsystem. By taking the maximum likelihood criterion function as the fitness function of the differential evolution algorithm, we present a maximum likelihood-based differential evolution (ML-DE) algorithm for parameter estimation. To improve the parameter estimation accuracy, we introduce the adaptive mutation factor and the adaptive crossover factor into the ML-DE algorithm and propose a maximum likelihood-based adaptive differential evolution algorithm. The simulation study indicates the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.