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

4-Hydroxy-2-( E)-nonenal (4-HNE) is one of the major lipid peroxidation product formed during oxidative stress. At high concentrations, 4-HNE is cytotoxic and exerts deleterious effects that are often associated with the pathology of oxidative stress-driven disease. Alternatively, at low concentrations it functions as a signaling molecule that can activate protective pathways including the antioxidant Nrf2-Keap1 pathway. Although these biphasic signaling properties have been enumerated in many diseases and pathways, it has yet to be addressed whether 4-HNE has the capacity to modulate oxidative stress-driven lipid peroxidation. Here we report an auto-regulatory mechanism of 4-HNE via modulation of the biological oxidant nitric oxide (NO). Utilizing LPS-activated macrophages to induce biological oxidant production, we demonstrate that 4-HNE modulates NO levels via inhibition of iNOS expression. We illustrate a proposed model of control of NO formation whereby at low concentrations of 4-HNE a negative feedback loop maintains a constant level of NO production with an observed inflection at approximately 1μM, while at higher 4-HNE concentrations positive feedback is observed. Further, we demonstrate that this negative feedback loop of NO production control is dependent on the Nrf2-Keap1 signaling pathway. Taken together, the careful regulation of NO production by 4-HNE argues for a more fundamental role of this lipid peroxidation product in normal physiology. © 2014 The Authors.

World University root node

Department of Chemistry

Fulltext

Redox Biology

Identification of a negative feedback loop in biological oxidant formation fegulated by 4-hydroxy-2-(E)-nonenal

Disulfide bridges are no longer considered to merely stabilize protein structure, but are increasingly recognized to play a functional role in many regulatory biomolecular processes. Recent studies have uncovered that the redox activity of native disulfides depends on their C-C-S-S dihedrals, χ2 and χ′2. Moreover, the interplay of chemical reactivity and mechanical stress of disulfide switches has been recently elucidated using force-clamp spectroscopy and computer simulation. The χ2and χ′2 angles have been found to change from conformations that are open to nucleophilic attack to sterically hindered, so-called closed states upon exerting tensile stress. In view of the growing evidence of the importance of C-C-S-S dihedrals in tuning the reactivity of disulfides, here we present a systematic study of the conformational diversity of disulfides as a function of tensile stress. With the help of force-clamp metadynamics simulations, we show that tensile stress brings about a large stabilization of the closed conformers, thereby giving rise to drastic changes in the conformational free energy landscape of disulfides. Statistical analysis shows that native TDi, DO and interchain Ig protein disulfides prefer open conformations, whereas the intrachain disulfide bridges in Ig proteins favor closed conformations. Correlating mechanical stress with the distance between the two α-carbons of the disulfide moiety reveals that the strain of intrachain Ig protein disulfides corresponds to a mechanical activation of about 100 pN. Such mechanical activation leads to a severalfold increase of the rate of the elementary redox .SN2 reaction step. All these findings constitute a step forward towards achieving a full understanding of functional disulfides. © 2014 Anjukandi et al.

PLoS ONE

The effect of tensile stress on the conformational free energy landscape of disulfide bonds

This paper deals with the finite-time control of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle about the hovering position by converting the linearized model to its Brunovsky canonical form. It is shown that all the sliding surfaces have relative degree five or three. Simulations are carried out using higher order continuous finite time controllers. © 2014 IFAC.

Department of Electrical Engineering

IFAC Proceedings Volumes (IFAC-PapersOnline)

Finite-time control of a quadrotor system

This paper addresses the issue of developing a robust and efficient controller for a manipulator for underwater applications by proposing a terminal sliding mode control scheme along with a disturbance observer and incorporating the same for 3-RRR serial spatial manipulator to ensure finite time convergence as asymptotic convergence in undesirable in underwater tasks like positioning and tracking of a trajectory. The performance of the proposed scheme is studied using extensive numerical simulations depicting practical circumstances with external disturbances and parameter uncertainties within the system. The capability of the control scheme to overcome hydrodynamic forces and moments including added mass effects, damping effects are extensively studied and validated for the control scheme. The dynamic modelling is done using the Euler-Lagrangian approach involving the energy associated with the system. The results are presented after analyzing the trajectory tracking capabilities of the manipulator in the presence of external disturbances and model uncertainties. © 2014 IEEE.

Department of Mechanical Engineering

2014 13th International Conference on Control Automation Robotics and Vision, ICARCV 2014

Disturbance observer based terminal sliding mode control of an underwater manipulator

Numerical investigations to assess the performance of different flux schemes for the spatial discretisation of the Euler equations have been performed. The schemes employed in the study include flux vector and flux difference splitting schemes as well as hybrid schemes. The schemes are cast in an unstructured high-order finite volume framework and are studied on typical engineering problems in the supersonic and hypersonic regimes. While all the flux schemes perform well in the supersonic and low hypersonic range, their performance show a marked change in the high Mach number regimes. Numerical experiments suggest that the AUSM family of schemes is the most accurate while the Rusanov scheme is the most robust for the range of Mach numbers considered in the study. These studies indicate that a robust and accurate numerical solver for high-speed compressible flows necessitate the use of blended schemes that provide a right balance between accuracy and numerical dissipation. © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Progress in Computational Fluid Dynamics

Performance comparison of flux schemes for numerical simulation of high-speed inviscid flows

A series of novel Cp*-based (Cp*=η5-C 5Me5) agostic, bis(σ-borate) and boratrane complexes have been synthesized from diruthenium and dirhodium analogues of pentaborane(9). The synthesis and structural characterization of the first neutral ruthenadiborane(6) analogue are also reported. This new route offers a very efficient method for the isolation of bis(σ-borate) and agostic complexes from diruthenapentaborane(9). © 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Angewandte Chemie International Edition

Reactivity of diruthenium and dirhodium analogues of pentaborane (9): Agostic versus boratrane complexes

We study the dynamics of a tilted one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model for two distinct protocols using numerical diagonalization for a finite sized system (N≤18). The first protocol involves periodic variation of the effective electric field E seen by the bosons which takes the system twice (per drive cycle) through the intermediate quantum critical point. We show that such a drive leads to nonmonotonic variation of the excitation density D and the wave function overlap F at the end of a drive cycle as a function of the drive frequency ω1, relate this effect to a generalized version of Stückelberg interference phenomenon, and identify special frequencies for which D and 1-F approach zero leading to near-perfect dynamic freezing phenomenon. The second protocol involves a simultaneous linear ramp of both the electric field E (with a rate ω1) and the boson hopping parameter J (with a rate ω2) starting from the ground state for a low effective electric field up to the quantum critical point. We find that both D and the residual energy Q decrease with increasing ω2; our results thus demonstrate a method of achieving near-adiabatic protocol in an experimentally realizable quantum critical system. We suggest experiments to test our theory. © 2014 American Physical Society.

Department of Physics

Physical Review B - Condensed Matter and Materials Physics

Dynamic freezing and defect suppression in the tilted one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model

Biological Sciences and Engineering

Trends in Pharmacological Sciences

Targeting CCR4 as an emerging strategy for cancer therapy and vaccines

A graphene-based electrochemical DNA sensor has been developed for the low-concentration detection of breast cancer-related BRCA1 gene. The DNA sensor used a "sandwich" detection strategy, in which capture probe (DNA-c) and reporter probe (DNA-r) DNAs hybridize to target probe DNA (DNA-t) in a sandwich arrangement on a graphene-modified glassy carbon electrode (GCE). The DNA-r was conjugated to gold nanoparticle and the oxidation of gold nanoparticle was used for the electrochemical detection of DNA-t. The sensor performance was monitored with cyclic voltammetry (CV) and chronoamperometry. The sensor was found to be stable, reproducible and sensitive and it could detect up to 1 femtomolar BRCA1 gene (5.896 femtogram/ml). {\textcopyright} 2014 Elsevier B.V.

Sensors and Actuators, B: Chemical

Graphene-DNA electrochemical sensor for the sensitive detection of BRCA1 gene

Biological systems have long recognized the importance of macromolecular diversity and have evolved efficient processes for the rapid synthesis of sequence-defined biopolymers. However, achieving sequence control via synthetic methods has proven to be a difficult challenge. Herein we describe efforts to circumvent this difficulty via the use of orthogonal allyl acrylamide building blocks and a liquid-phase fluorous support for the de novo design and synthesis of sequence-specific polymers. We demonstrate proof-of-concept via synthesis and characterization of two sequence-isomeric 10-mer polymers. 1H NMR and LCMS were used to confirm their chemical structure while tandem MS was used to confirm sequence identity. Further validation of this methodology was provided via the successful synthesis of a sequence-specific 16-mer polymer incorporating nine different monomers. This strategy thus shows promise as an efficient approach for the assembly of sequence-specific functional polymers. © 2014 American Chemical Society.