METHODOLOGY STUDY AND ANALYSIS OF MAGNESIUM ALLOY METAL MATRIX COMPOSITES

ABSTRACT Magnesium alloys have been increasingly used in the automotive and aircraft industry in recent years due to their Light weight Magnesium alloys have excellent specific strength and stiffness, exceptional dimensional stability, high damping capacity, and high recycle ability. Magnesium and its alloys are becoming widely recognized as playing an increasingly important role in automotive, aircraft, and electronic consumer products. Magnesium alloy metal matrix composite (MMC) containing 14 vol. % Saffil fibres. The squeeze casting process was used to produce the composites and the process variables evaluated were applied pressure, from 0.1 MPa to 120 MPa, and preform temperature from 250 °C to 750 °C

SnugDock: Paratope Structural Optimization during Antibody-Antigen Docking Compensates for Errors in Antibody Homology Models

High resolution structures of antibody-antigen complexes are useful for analyzing the binding interface and to make rational choices for antibody engineering. When a crystallographic structure of a complex is unavailable, the structure must be predicted using computational tools. In this work, we illustrate a novel approach, named SnugDock, to predict high-resolution antibody-antigen complex structures by simultaneously structurally optimizing the antibody-antigen rigid-body positions, the relative orientation of the antibody light and heavy chains, and the conformations of the six complementarity determining region loops. This approach is especially useful when the crystal structure of the antibody is not available, requiring allowances for inaccuracies in an antibody homology model which would otherwise frustrate rigid-backbone docking predictions. Local docking using SnugDock with the lowest-energy RosettaAntibody homology model produced more accurate predictions than standard rigid-body docking. SnugDock can be combined with ensemble docking to mimic conformer selection and induced fit resulting in increased sampling of diverse antibody conformations. The combined algorithm produced four medium (Critical Assessment of PRediction of Interactions-CAPRI rating) and seven acceptable lowest-interface-energy predictions in a test set of fifteen complexes. Structural analysis shows that diverse paratope conformations are sampled, but docked paratope backbones are not necessarily closer to the crystal structure conformations than the starting homology models. The accuracy of SnugDock predictions suggests a new genre of general docking algorithms with flexible binding interfaces targeted towards making homology models useful for further high-resolution predictions