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

Micropipette aspiration technique can be very useful for describing the shape transitions of lipid bilayer vesicles with fluid phase coexistence modulated by the line tension and the bending rigidity. For example, composition dependence of the line tension at the liquid-ordered and liquid-disordered phase interface has been investigated using this technique. Recently, using a very simple mechanical model, the instabilities that occur during suction and release experiments of aspirated vesicles have been discussed. Due to its simplicity the model could not predict the influence of the bending rigidity. In this work, we incorporate the contributions from Helfrich bending energy and the line energy in the vesicle free energy and investigate the shape transitions in micropipette aspirated vesicles. We discuss how the critical aspiration pressure depends on the bending moduli of the phases, the line tension at the interface, and the reduced volume of the vesicle. The ratio of the bending moduli that we predict using the critical aspiration pressure data from recent experiments agrees with the literature. © 2010 The American Physical Society.

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Physical Review E - Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics

Influence of the bending rigidity and the line tension on the mechanical stability of micropipette aspirated vesicles

We propose that Kibble-Zurek scaling can be studied in optical lattices by creating geometries that support Dirac, semi-Dirac and quadratic band crossings. On a honeycomb lattice with fermions, as a staggered on-site potential is varied through zero, the system crosses the gapless Dirac points, and we show that the density of defects created scales as 1/τ, where τ is the inverse rate of change of the potential, in agreement with the Kibble-Zurek relation. We generalize the result for a passage through a semi-Dirac point in d dimensions, in which spectrum is linear in m parallel directions and quadratic in the rest of the perpendicular (d-m) directions. We find that the defect density is given by 1/τ mν||z||+(d-m) ν⊥z⊥ where ν||, z|| and ν⊥, z⊥ are the dynamical exponents and the correlation length exponents along the parallel and perpendicular directions, respectively. The scaling relations are also generalized to the case of non-linear quenching. Copyright © 2010 EPLA.

World University root node

Department of Physics

Fulltext

Quenching through Dirac and semi-Dirac points in optical lattices: Kibble-Zurek scaling for anisotropic quantum critical systems

Department of Chemistry

The FASEB Journal

Partial beta‐oxidation and bilateral alpha‐oxidation of gamma‐hydroxybutyrate (GHB) in perfused rat livers

We report a single-step approach to producing small and stable bubbles functionalized with nanoparticles. The strategy includes the following events occurring in sequence: (i) a microfluidic generation of bubbles from a mixture of CO2 and a minute amount of gases with low solubility in water, in an aqueous solution of a protein, a polysaccharide, and anionic nanoparticles; (ii) rapid dissolution of CO2 leading to the shrinkage of bubbles and an increase in acidity of the medium in the vicinity of the bubbles; and (iii) co-deposition of the biopolymers and nanoparticles at the bubble-liquid interface. The proposed approach yielded microbubbles with a narrow size distribution, long-term stability, and multiple functions originating from the attachment of metal oxide, metal, or semiconductor nanoparticles onto the bubble surface. We show the potential applications of these bubbles in ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging. © 2010 American Chemical Society.

ACS Nano

Microbubbles loaded with nanoparticles: A route to multiple imaging modalities

A tremendous growth in the field of carbon nanomaterials has led to the emergence of carbon nanotubes, fullerenes, mesoporous carbon and more recently graphene. Some of these materials have found applications in electronics, sensors, catalysis, drug delivery, composites, and so forth. The high temperatures and hydrocarbon precursors involved in their synthesis usually yield highly inert graphitic surfaces. As some of the applications require functionalization of their inert graphitic surface with groups like -COOH, -OH, and -NH2, treatment of these materials in oxidizing agents and concentrated acids become inevitable. More recent works have involved using precursors like carbohydrates to produce carbon nanostructures rich in functional groups in a single-step under hydrothermal conditions. These carbon nanostructures have already found many applications in composites, drug delivery, materials synthesis, and Li ion batteries. The review aims to highlight some of the recent developments in the application of carbohydrate derived carbon nanostructures and also provide an outlook of their future prospects. © 2010 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH&amp;Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Chemistry - An Asian Journal

Functionalized carbon nanomaterials derived from carbohydrates

We present a new nonlinear control law to stabilise the ball and beam system at a desired operating point. The control law is based on the interconnection and damping assignment-passivity-based control (IDA-PBC) methodology developed in Ortega, Spong, Gomez-Estern, and Blankenstien (Ortega, R., Spong, M., Gomez-Estern, F., and Blankenstien, G. (2002), 'Stabilization of Underactuated Mechanical Systems via Interconnection and Damping Assignment', IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 47, 1218-1233) that guarantees stability in the sense of Lyapunov. We present a novel proof of the asymptotic stability of the desired operating point. The validity of the proposed control law is demonstrated through the experimental results. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.

Department of Electrical Engineering

International Journal of Control

Asymptotic stabilisation of the ball and beam system: Design of energy-based control law and experimental results

The mobility of the organic dye DCM (4-dicyanomethylene-2-methyl-6-p- dimethyl aminostyryl-4H-pyran) in the gel and fluid phases of a lipid vesicle is studied by fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS). Using FCS, translational diffusion of DCM is determined in the gel phase and fluid phase of a single lipid vesicle adhered to a glass surface. The size of a lipid vesicle (average diameter ∼100 nm) is smaller than the diffraction limited spot size (∼250 nm) of the microscope. Thus, the vesicle is confined within the laser focus. Three lipid vesicles (1,2-dilauroyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DLPC), 1,2-dimyristoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DMPC), and 1,2-dipalmitoyl-sn- glycero-3-phosphocholine (DPPC)) having different gel transition temperatures (-1, 23, and 41 °C, respectively) were studied. The diffusion coefficient of the dye DCM in bulk water is ∼300 μm2/s. In the lipid vesicle, the average Dt decreases markedly to ∼5 μm 2/s (∼60 times) in the gel phase (for DPPC at 20 °C) and 40 μm2/s (∼8 times) in the fluid phase (for DLPC at 20 °C). This clearly demonstrates higher mobility in the fluid phase compared with the gel phase of a lipid. It is observed that the Dt values vary from lipid to lipid and there is a distribution of Dt values. The diffusion of the hydrophobic dye DCM (Dt ∼ 5 μm2/s) in the DPPC vesicle is found to be 8 times smaller than that of a hydrophilic anioinic dye C343 (Dt ∼ 40 μm2/s). This is attributed to different locations of the hydrophobic (DCM) and hydrophilic (C343) dyes. © 2010 American Chemical Society.

Journal of Physical Chemistry B

A fluorescence correlation spectroscopy study of the diffusion of an organic dye in the gel phase and fluid phase of a single lipid vesicle

Biological Sciences and Engineering

Nature

Metrics: Journal's impact factor skewed by a single paper

The immunogenicity of therapeutic factor VIII (FVIII) in patients with haemophilia A remains a critical issue in patient management. This review describes the immunological processes involved in the activation of the immune system against FVIII, with a particular focus on the role of endocytic receptors for the recognition of FVIII by antigen-presenting cells. © Schattauer 2010.

Thrombosis and Haemostasis

Endocytic receptor for pro-coagulant factor VIII: Relevance to inhibitor formation

Endogenous opioid peptides mainly produced by neurons are also released by immune cells. They bind to-(μ-opioid receptor, MOR), δ-, and-opioid receptors. On the basis of studies on mice showing that MOR is the main mediator of the deleterious effects of opioids on immunity, we wondered whether MOR, absent under normal conditions, is expressed in some pathological situations such as lymphomas. mRNA expression for all three opioid receptors was examined in lymph node biopsy samples from patients with non-Hodgkin's B-cell and T-cell lymphomas. We found that MOR and one of its ligands (enkephalin) are simultaneously expressed almost exclusively in lymph nodes from patients with Sézary cutaneous T cell lymphoma. As MOR was undetectable in circulating malignant T lymphocytes and in normal immune cells, we hypothesized that tumor-released cytokines might induce MOR expression in non-neoplastic lymph node cells. The correlation between mRNA levels of MOR and interleukin-13 (IL-13) within lymph nodes from Sézary patients led us to investigate the ability of IL-13 to upregulate MOR expression in normal immune cell subsets. We found that IL-13 upregulates MOR in activated Langerhans cells. Thus, our data suggest that, under pathological conditions, IL-13 overexpression might allow immune-derived endogenous opioids to down-modulate immune response. © 2010 The Society for Investigative Dermatology.