Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

The challenges in classical way of inventory log are human mathematical ability, paper maintenance, untidy process of editing and chances of missing the data of invoice and outward. The proposed idea is to develop an inventory management application using Tkinter and SQLite platform that creates a way towards progressively from traditional applications to a fully connected and customized inventory management system. This application uses password encryption to ensure the data privacy between the administrators and other workers of the industry. The system utilizes the integration of Tkinter and SQLite for the effective Graphical User Interface interfaced with Relational Database Management System. This customized application enables the administrator to add a new employee or remove the existing employee, he can update the stock quantity, and can back up the invoice history. Due to the login feature, the details of the product outward such as who withdrew and when it was withdrawn are automatically stored in the database. This digitization of inventory management system increases flexibility, reliability, smart storage, resource utilization, easy access to product location and warehouse management. It would be one time investment no further investment needed if at all any problem or errors occur in the app by human mishandling. The application saves us a lot of time because it uses SQL in it which is structured language, the data can be retrieved soon without any time delay and the human errors are avoided due to its structured nature.

Department of Chemistry

World University root node

Design And Development Of An Application For Database Maintenance In Inventory Management System Using Tkinter And Sqlite Platform

Basophils are rare granulocytes and dysregulated functions of these cells are associated with several atopic and non-atopic allergic diseases of skin, respiratory system and gastrointestinal tract. Both cytokines and immunoglobulin E (IgE) are implicated in mediating the basophil activation and pathogenesis of these disorders. Several reports have shown that healthy individuals, and patients with allergic disorders display IgG autoantibodies to IgE and hence functional characterization of these anti-IgE IgG autoantibodies is critical. In general, anti-IgE IgG autoantibodies modulate basophil activation irrespective of allergen specificity by interacting with constant domains of IgE. Therefore, an ideal solution to prove the functions of such anti-IgE IgG autoantibodies would be to completely eliminate type I high affinity immunoglobulin E receptor (FcɛRI)-bound IgE from the surface of basophils and to demonstrate in an unequivocal manner the role of anti-IgE IgG autoantibodies. In line with previous reports, our data show that FcɛRI on peripheral blood basophils are almost saturated with IgE. Further, acetic acid buffer (pH 4) efficiently removes these FcɛRI-bound IgE. Although immediately following acetic acid-elution of IgE had no repercussion on the viability of basophils, following 24 hours culture with interleukin-3 (IL-3), the viability and yield of basophils were drastically reduced in acid-treated cells and had repercussion on the induction of activation markers. Lactic acid treatment on the other hand though had no adverse effects on the viability of basophils and IL-3-induced activation, it removed only a small fraction of the cell surface bound IgE. Thus, our results show that acid buffers could be used for the elution of FcɛRI-bound IgE on the basophil surface for the biochemical characterization of IgE antibodies or for the immediate use of basophils to determine their sensitivity to undergo degranulation by specific allergens. However, these methods are not utile for the functional assays of basophils that require longer duration of culture and entire removal of surface IgE to validate the role of anti-IgE IgG autoantibodies that interact with FcɛRI-bound IgE irrespective of allergen specificity. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Biological Sciences and Engineering

Fulltext

International Journal of Molecular Sciences

Acid stripping of surface IgE antibodies bound to FcεRI is unsuitable for the functional assays that require long-term culture of basophils and entire removal of surface IgE

Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology

Editorial: The Role of the Fungal Cell Wall in Host-Fungal Interactions

Immune inertness of Aspergillus fumigatus conidia is attributed to its surface rodlet-layer made up of RodAp, characterized by eight conserved cysteine residues forming four disulfide bonds. Earlier, we showed that the conserved cysteine residue point (ccrp) mutations result in conidia devoid of the rodlet layer. Here, we extended our study comparing the surface organization and immunoreactivity of conidia carrying ccrp-mutations with the RODA deletion mutant (∆rodA). Western blot analysis using anti-RodAp antibodies indicated the absence of RodAp in the cytoplasm of ccrp-mutant conidia. Immunolabeling revealed differential reactivity to conidial surface glucans, the ccrp-mutant conidia preferentially binding to α-(1,3)-glucan, ∆rodA conidia selectively bound to β-(1,3)-glucan; the parental strain conidia showed negative labeling. However, permeability of ccrp-mutants and ∆rodA was similar to the parental strain conidia. Proteomic analyses of the conidial surface exposed proteins of the ccrp-mutants showed more similarities with the parental strain, but were significantly different from the ∆rodA. Ccrp-mutant conidia were less immunostimulatory compared to ∆rodA conidia. Our data suggest that (i) the conserved cysteine residues are essential for the trafficking of RodAp and the organization of the rodlet layer on the conidial surface, and (ii) targeted point mutation could be an alternative approach to study the role of fungal cell-wall genes in host–fungal interaction. © MDPI AG. All rights reserved.

Journal of Fungi

The role of roda-conserved cysteine residues in the aspergillus fumigatus conidial surface organization

Autophagy plays an important role in the regulation of autoimmune and autoinflammatory responses of the immune cells. Defective autophagy process is associated with various autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Moreover, in many of these diseases, the therapeutic use of normal immunoglobulin G or intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG), a pooled normal IgG preparation, is well documented. Therefore, we explored if IVIG immunotherapy exerts therapeutic benefits via induction of autophagy in the immune cells. Here we show that IVIG induces autophagy in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs). Further dissection of this process revealed that IVIG-induced autophagy is restricted to inflammatory cells like monocytes, dendritic cells, and M1 macrophages but not in cells associated with Th2 immune response like M2 macrophages. IVIG induces autophagy by activating AMP-dependent protein kinase, beclin-1, class III phosphoinositide 3-kinase and p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase and by inhibiting mammalian target of rapamycin. Mechanistically, IVIG-induced autophagy is F(ab′)2-dependent but sialylation independent, and requires endocytosis of IgG by innate cells. Inhibition of autophagy compromised the ability of IVIG to suppress the inflammatory cytokines in innate immune cells. Moreover, IVIG therapy in inflammatory myopathies such as dermatomyositis, antisynthetase syndrome and immune-mediated necrotizing myopathy induced autophagy in PBMCs and reduced inflammatory cytokines in the circulation, thus validating the translational importance of these results. Our data provide insight on how circulating normal immunoglobulins maintain immune homeostasis and explain in part the mechanism by which IVIG therapy benefits patients with autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. © 2020, The Author(s).

Cell Death and Disease

Intravenous immunoglobulin mediates anti-inflammatory effects in peripheral blood mononuclear cells by inducing autophagy

Two-dimensional (2D) MXenes have demonstrated outstanding antimicrobial properties owing to their unique physiochemical properties and ultrathin lamellar structure. However, the relationship between MXene sheet size and its antimicrobial activity and how the atomic structure can impact the antibacterial mechanism are yet to be revealed. This study investigates the effect of atomic structure and size dependency on the antibacterial activity of two niobium carbide MXenes (Nb2CTx and Nb4C3Tx) using model Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria. The results showed that the bactericidal property of Nb2CTx and Nb4C3Tx against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus is dependent on the sheet size and atomic structure of both MXenes. 120 $\mu$g/mL delaminated (DL)-Nb2CTx and DL-Nb4C3Tx exhibited growth inhibition of 94.2 and 96.1% for E. coli and 91.6 and 93.7% for S. aureus cells within 3 h of incubation, respectively. The bacterial cell viability decreased with decreasing lateral sheet size of DL-Nb2CTx and DL-Nb4C3Tx down to 160 and 183 nm, respectively. DL-Nb4C3Tx-183 showed higher antibacterial activity than DL-Nb2CTx-160 because of a higher c lattice parameter. Moreover, DL-Nb4C3Tx-183 demonstrated higher oxidative stress on both bacterial cells in comparison with DL-Nb2CTx-160. This study highlights the role of the atomic structure of MXenes and the importance of tailoring the lateral size of the nanosheets to optimize the bactericidal properties of 2D nanomaterials.

ACS Applied Nano Materials

Effect of Sheet Size and Atomic Structure on the Antibacterial Activity of Nb-MXene Nanosheets

The work proposes an interleaved modulation method for two three-level converters connected in parallel for grid applications such as high-power active front end rectifiers, STATCOMs, and so on. The parallel converter system is controlled using a centralised predictive controller and 60° discontinuous pulse width modulation, with phase-shifted/interleaved carriers. The proposed PWM utilises the switching state redundancy of '0' state of the flying capacitor topology such that instantaneous pole voltage difference between the converters is zero. The proposed method eliminates the circulating current flow between the converters, and shifts the dominant grid current harmonics to twice the switching frequency. The method also ensures the balancing of flying capacitor voltages along with a reduction in common mode voltage. © 2020 IEEE.

Department of Electrical Engineering

9th IEEE International Conference on Power Electronics, Drives and Energy Systems, PEDES 2020

Interleaved PWM for parallel converters with single DC link for zero circulating current

Phased array antennas are being increasingly used in weather radars. However, these antennas have the inherent property that the horizontal and vertical waves are not orthogonal in all azimuth and elevation angles range. Thus, designing phased array antennas with very low cross-polarization is of significant interest to radar scientists and engineers. This work aims at implementing a dual linearly polarized aperture-coupled antenna design and layout so as to reduce this undesired cross-polarization while maintaining the required beamwidth, radiation pattern and scan range range. Here, an antenna element and the corresponding subarray of the antenna elements are implemented, which result in significantly low cross-polarization. This sub-array will be used for full array design. © 2020 IEEE.

Proceedings of the 2020 International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation, APSYM 2020

Enhancement in Dual Polarization Phased Array Antenna Performance and Calibration Techniques for Weather Radar Applications

Streaming codes offer reliable recovery under decoding-delay constraint $\tau $ , of packets transmitted over a burst-and-random-erasure channel. Prior rate-optimal code constructions had field size quadratic in $\tau $ and employed diagonal embedding of a scalar block code of length $n$ within the packet stream. It is shown here that staggered diagonal embedding (SDE) under which the $n$ code symbols are dispersed across a span of $N \ge n$ successive packets leads to a simpler, low-complexity construction of rate-optimal streaming codes having linear field size. The limits of the SDE approach under the restriction $N \leq \tau +1$ are explored. Some binary streaming codes that are rate-optimal under this restriction are identified. © 1997-2012 IEEE.

Department of Data Science

IEEE Communications Letters

Simple Streaming Codes for Reliable, Low-Latency Communication

This paper presents a new design for a Circularly Polarized Square Slot Antenna (CPSSA). The proposed antenna is single layered with L-shaped stubs loaded on both the opposite corners of the antenna, which is capable of generating orthogonal modes for the excitation of Circular Polarization. Two asymmetric strips on the top and the left portions of the proposed antenna and various other asymmetric strips are also loaded. The proposed structure is having the dimensions of 40 x 40 x 1.6 mm3.The designed CPSSA operates in the range of 3.2-12.5 GHz with Axial Ratio (AR) bandwidth in the range of 4.5-8.5 GHz. In this paper the improvement of the performance parameters like AR and Return Loss (S11) on the addition of asymmetric stubs is explained in detail. © 2020 IEEE.