Identifying Novel Inhibitors of RpFabG in Typhus-inducing Rickettsia prowazekii

Epidemic typhus is a rickettsial disease that is contracted via ticks and lice found on the flying squirrel. The disease is caused by Rickettsia prowazekii, an intracellular, gram-negative coccobacillus. The biosynthetic pathways of Rickettsia prowazekii and its host are intertwined. Therefore, the ideal antipathogenic drugs would not target a protein that is found within the biochemical pathway of the human host. There is a type II fatty acid synthase pathway that is unique to Rickettsia prowazekii, which can be distinguished from the multienzyme type I fatty- acid synthase pathway used in humans. Fab G 3-ketoacyl-(acyl-carrier-protein) reductase (RpFabG) is a protein that is specific to this type II pathway. Hence, this research is focused on finding a small molecule drug that inhibits RpFabG. The coding DNA sequence for the RpFabG protein was previously cloned into a pNICJBsa4 plasmid, which was transformed into BL21(DE3 Escherichia coli and Dh5α competent cells. The transformed bacteria were cultured in LB media, and the cells were harvested. The expressed protein was purified via Ni-NTA affinity chromatography, made possible by a His6 tag on the vector. Gel electrophoresis was performed to determine the purity of the obtained protein sample; due to indication of slight contamination, gel filtration fast protein liquid chromatography was run on a concentrated protein sample. Genetic Optimization of Ligand Docking (GOLD is a molecular docking software package that was used to rank potential inhibitors of RpFabG according to binding strength; ethyl acetoacetate (EAA and acetoacyl coenzyme A (AAC) were determined to have high binding strengths and thus determined to be strong potential inhibitors. An enzyme assay was run to determine the functionality of the enzyme, with EAA and AAC as substrates. AAC successfully decreased the enzymatic activity of RpFabG, suggesting its potential as a novel drug. DSF assay results were equivocal, indicating that inhibition assays should be run on AAC to further assess its potential as an inhibitor.College of Natural Science

Environmental Sustainability and the Account of Genuine Wealth in India

In order to gauge the sustainability of the economic growth of nations, genuine savings rates are used as a ready comparable measure. Essentially it provides a measure of the sum of the change in various forms of capital, including manufactured, ecological (natural resource and pollution), human and knowledge capital. The depreciation in manufactured and natural capital during the economic growth process is deducted from the conventional national savings to measure genuine wealth. With increasing attention to global warming, the loss due to the increase in stock pollution of carbon emissions has also entered into the accounting exercise. However the damage from local flow and stock pollutants to human capital productivity has not got the same attention. This paper argues that in a developing country like India, where adverse human health impacts are known to be significant from local pollution and defensive expenditure is not forthcoming from the population at large, ignoring human productivity losses introduces a serious upward bias in the genuine wealth and savings measure especially with an increasing trend in emission of hazardous wastes. To this effect, it considers human capital as a function of both education and the stock pollutant in the Hamilton model that further raises the cost of pollutants. The paper suggests that, the depreciation in human capital may be taken as an increasing function of the local pollution generated in the system (following the current logic of using education expenditure as a proxy for enhancement in human capital). The attention to the local pollutants in the genuine wealth and savings measure would help focus developing country government policy on local pollution concurrently with their focus on global pollutants. The paper observes that current development of green accounting system in India is a step in the right direction, since it has attempted to account for health costs of pollution in some of the states.

Health Insurance and Job Creation by the Self-Employed

Nearly half of all companies surveyed by the National Federation of Independent Business's Education Foundation reported that health insurance costs were a critical problem. States regulate health insurance by mandating minimum levels of certain benefits as part of policies offered. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of state health insurance mandates on job creation by small firms, using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation for 1993-95. Results from an ordered probit regression indicate that the greater the number of mandates in a state, the lower the probability that a self-employed person will hire additional people. These results hold when we consider both the sum of mandates as well as a cost weighted measure of the most expensive mandates. The predicted probability of owning a business with at least one employee decreases by nearly 10 percentage points as the number of mandates increases from 0 to 16.

Designing the balanced scorecard to improve student satisfaction in educational organisations

Student satisfaction is the top priority of educational institutions. The focus of this research is designing and implementing a balanced scorecard for educational institutes. Kaplan and Norton developed the concept of a balanced scorecard framework. This framework is broadly applied by both profit and non-profit institutions. Higher educational organisations are under a continuous burden to gather as many students as they can. In this competitive market, there are a lot of factors which contribute to the selection of the institute where students want to study. This research aims to analyse the trends of students and factors which contribute to student selection of an institute. This framework will be utilised to investigate student satisfaction which will contribute to strategic planning and improving performance. The method used in this research was interviews with pupils, which were used to measure their satisfaction, views, and opinions. There is an overall good level of student satisfaction. There are some areas which need attention and suggestions from students can help improve performance. Results derived can also be used for future strategic planning and help in management decisions, and further modification of the frameworks will definitively contribute to a high level of performance and better student satisfaction.

Isotropic-Cholesteric Transition of a Weakly Chiral Elastomer Cylinder

When a chiral isotropic elastomer is brought to low temperature cholesteric phase, the nematic degree of freedom tends to order and form a helix. Due to the nemato-elastic coupling, this also leads to elastic deformation of the polymer network that is locally coaxial with the nematic order. However, the helical structure of nematic order is incompatible with the energetically preferred elastic deformation. The system is therefore frustrated and appropriate compromise has to be achieved between the nematic ordering and the elastic deformation. For a strongly chiral elastomer whose pitch is much smaller than the system size, this problem has been studied by Pelcotivs and Meyer, as well as by Warner. In this work, we study the isotropic-cholesteric transition in the weak chirality limit, where the pitch is comparable or much larger than system size. We compare two possible solutions: a helical state as well as a double twist state. We find that the double twist state very efficiently minimizes both the elastic free energy and the chiral nematic free energy. On the other hand, the pitch of the helical state is strongly affected by the nemato-elastic coupling. As a result this state is not efficient in minimizing the chiral nematic free energy.Comment: 7 pages, 2 eps figure