2,592 research outputs found
In-situ development of self-defensive antibacterial biomaterials: phenol-g-keratin-EC based bio-composites with characteristics for biomedical applications
Recently, the development of highly inspired biomaterials with multi-functional characteristics has gained considerable attention, especially in biomedical, and other health-related areas of the modern world. It is well-known that the lack of antibacterial potential has signiïŹcantly limited biomaterials for many challenging applications such as infection free wound healing and/or tissue engineering etc. In this perspective, herein, a series of novel bio-composites with natural phenols as functional entities and keratin-EC as a base material were synthesised by laccase-assisted grafting. Subsequently, the resulting composites were removed from their respective casting surfaces, critically evaluated for their antibacterial and biocompatibility features and information is also given on their soil burial degradation profile. In-situ synthesised phenol-g-keratin-EC bio-composites possess strong anti-bacterial activity against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacterial strains i.e., B. subtilis NCTC 3610, P. aeruginosa NCTC 10662, E. coli NTCT 10418 and S. aureus NCTC 6571. More specifically, 10HBA-g-keratin-EC and 20T-g-keratin-EC composites were 100% resistant to colonisation against all of the aforementioned bacterial strains, whereas, 15CA-g-keratin-EC and 15GA-g-keratin-EC showed almost negligible colonisation up to a variable extent. Moreover, at various phenolic concentrations used, the newly synthesised composites remained cytocompatible with human keratinocyte-like HaCaT, as an obvious cell ingrowth tendency was observed and indicated by the neutral red dye uptake assay. From the degradation point of view, an increase in the degradation rate was recorded during their soil burial analyses. Our investigations could encourage greater utilisation of natural materials to develop bio-composites with novel and sophisticated characteristics for potential applications
ABCB1 Does Not Require the Side-Chain Hydrogen-Bond Donors Gln347, Gln725, Gln990 to Confer Cellular Resistance to the Anticancer Drug Taxol
The multidrug efflux transporter ABCB1 is clinically important for drug absorption and
distribution and can be a determinant of chemotherapy failure. Recent structure data shows that three
glutamines donate hydrogen bonds to coordinate taxol in the drug binding pocket. This is consistent
with earlier drug structure-activity relationships that implicated the importance of hydrogen bonds
in drug recognition by ABCB1. By replacing the glutamines with alanines we have tested whether
any, or all, of Gln347, Gln725, and Gln990 are important for the transport of three different drug classes.
Flow cytometric transport assays show that Q347A and Q990A act synergistically to reduce transport
of Calcein-AM, BODIPY-verapamil, and OREGON GREEN-taxol bisacetate but the magnitude of
the effect was dependent on the test drug and no combination of mutations completely abrogated
function. Surprisingly, Q725A mutants generally improved transport of Calcein-AM and BODIPYverapamil, suggesting that engagement of the wild-type Gln725 in a hydrogen bond is inhibitory for
the transport mechanism. To test transport of unmodified taxol, stable expression of Q347/725A
and the triple mutant was engineered and shown to confer equivalent resistance to the drug as
the wild-type transporter, further indicating that none of these potential hydrogen bonds between
transporter and transport substrate are critical for the function of ABCB1. The implications of the
data for plasticity of the drug binding pocket are discussed
The Spin of Holographic Electrons at Nonzero Density and Temperature
We study the Green's function of a gauge invariant fermionic operator in a
strongly coupled field theory at nonzero temperature and density using a dual
gravity description. The gravity model contains a charged black hole in four
dimensional anti-de Sitter space and probe charged fermions. In particular, we
consider the effects of the spin of these probe fermions on the properties of
the Green's function. There exists a spin-orbit coupling between the spin of an
electron and the electric field of a Reissner-Nordstrom black hole. On the
field theory side, this coupling leads to a Rashba like dispersion relation. We
also study the effects of spin on the damping term in the dispersion relation
by considering how the spin affects the placement of the fermionic quasinormal
modes in the complex frequency plane in a WKB limit. An appendix contains some
exact solutions of the Dirac equation in terms of Heun polynomials.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figures; v2: minor changes, published versio
Continuous Hawking-Page transitions in Einstein-scalar gravity
We investigate continuous Hawking-Page transitions in Einstein's gravity
coupled to a scalar field with an arbitrary potential in the weak gravity
limit. We show that this is only possible in a singular limit where the
black-hole horizon marginally traps a curvature singularity. Depending on the
subleading terms in the potential, a rich variety of continuous phase
transitions arise. Our examples include second and higher order, including the
Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless type. In the case when the scalar is dilaton,
the condition for a continuous phase transition lead to (asymptotically)
linear-dilaton background. We obtain the scaling laws of thermodynamic
functions, as well as the viscosity coefficients near the transition. In the
limit of weak gravitational interactions, the bulk viscosity asymptotes to a
universal constant, independent of the details of the scalar potential. As a
byproduct of our analysis we obtain a one-parameter family of kink solutions in
arbitrary dimension d that interpolate between AdS near the boundary and
linear-dilaton background in the deep interior. The continuous Hawking-Page
transitions found here serve as holographic models for normal-to superfluid
transitions.Comment: 35 pages + appendice
Holographic bulk viscosity: GPR vs EO
Recently Eling and Oz (EO) proposed a formula for the holographic bulk
viscosity, in arXiv:1103.1657, derived from the null horizon focusing equation.
This formula seems different from that obtained earlier by Gubser, Pufu and
Rocha (GPR) in arXiv:0806.0407 calculated from the IR limit of the two-point
function of the trace of the stress tensor. The two were shown to agree only
for some simple scaling cases. We point out that the two formulae agree in two
non-trivial holographic theories describing RG flows. The first is the strongly
coupled N=2* gauge theory plasma. The second is the semi-phenomenological model
of Improved Holographic QCD.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figure
Single-Molecule Three-Color FRET with Both Negligible Spectral Overlap and Long Observation Time
Full understanding of complex biological interactions frequently requires multi-color detection capability in doing single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) experiments. Existing single-molecule three-color FRET techniques, however, suffer from severe photobleaching of Alexa 488, or its alternative dyes, and have been limitedly used for kinetics studies. In this work, we developed a single-molecule three-color FRET technique based on the Cy3-Cy5-Cy7 dye trio, thus providing enhanced observation time and improved data quality. Because the absorption spectra of three fluorophores are well separated, real-time monitoring of three FRET efficiencies was possible by incorporating the alternating laser excitation (ALEX) technique both in confocal microscopy and in total-internal-reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy
Bulk spectral function sum rule in QCD-like theories with a holographic dual
We derive the sum rule for the spectral function of the stress-energy tensor
in the bulk (uniform dilatation) channel in a general class of strongly coupled
field theories. This class includes theories holographically dual to a theory
of gravity coupled to a single scalar field, representing the operator of the
scale anomaly. In the limit when the operator becomes marginal, the sum rule
coincides with that in QCD. Using the holographic model, we verify explicitly
the cancellation between large and small frequency contributions to the
spectral integral required to satisfy the sum rule in such QCD-like theories.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figure
A Note on Computations of D-brane Superpotential
We develop some computational methods for the integrals over the 3-chains on
the compact Calabi-Yau 3-folds that plays a prominent role in the analysis of
the topological B-model in the context of the open mirror symmetry. We discuss
such 3-chain integrals in two approaches. In the first approach, we provide a
systematic algorithm to obtain the inhomogeneous Picard-Fuchs equations. In the
second approach, we discuss the analytic continuation of the period integral to
compute the 3-chain integral directly. The latter direct integration method is
applicable for both on-shell and off-shell formalisms.Comment: 61 pages, 5 figures; v2: typos corrected, minor changes, references
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A global phylogenetic analysis in order to determine the host species and geography dependent features present in the evolution of avian H9N2 influenza hemagglutinin
A complete phylogenetic analysis of all of the H9N2 hemagglutinin sequences that were collected between 1966 and 2012 was carried out in order to build a picture of the geographical and host specific evolution of the hemagglutinin protein. To improve the quality and applicability of the output data the sequences were divided into subsets based upon location and host species.
The phylogenetic analysis of hemagglutinin reveals that the protein has distinct lineages between China and the Middle East, and that wild birds in both regions retain a distinct form of the H9 molecule, from the same lineage as the ancestral hemagglutinin. The results add further evidence to the hypothesis that the current predominant H9N2 hemagglutinin lineage might have originated in Southern China. The study also shows that there are sampling problems that affect the reliability of this and any similar analysis. This raises questions about the surveillance of H9N2 and the need for wider sampling of the virus in the environment.
The results of this analysis are also consistent with a model where hemagglutinin has predominantly evolved by neutral drift punctuated by occasional selection events. These selective events have produced the current pattern of distinct lineages in the Middle East, Korea and China. This interpretation is in agreement with existing studies that have shown that there is widespread intra-country sequence evolution
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