Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University) Varanasi | Varanasi, India

Tapping on the Potential of Hyaluronic Acid: from Production to Application

Advanced Engineering Materials

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Literature Review

Applied Biochemistry and Biotechnology

The manufacture, purification, and applications of hyaluronic acid (HA) are discussed in this article. Concerning the growing need for affordable, high-quality HA, it is essential to consider diverse production techniques using renewable resources that pose little risk of cross-contamination. Many microorganisms can now be used to produce HA without limiting the availability of raw materials and in an environmentally friendly manner. The production of HA has been associated with Streptococci A and C, explicitly S. zooepidemicus and S. equi. Different fermentation techniques, including the continuous, batch, fed-batch, and repeated batch culture, have been explored to increase the formation of HA, particularly from S. zooepidemicus. The topic of current interest also involves a complex broth rich in metabolites and residual substrates, intensifying downstream processes to achieve high recovery rates and purity. Although there are already established methods for commercial HA production, the anticipated growth in trade and the diversification of application opportunities necessitate the development of new procedures to produce HA with escalated productivity, specified molecular weights, and purity. In this report, we have enacted the advancement of HA technical research by analyzing bacterial biomanufacturing elements, upstream and downstream methodologies, and commercial-scale HA scenarios.

Reduction of Platinum(IV) Prodrug Hemoglobin Nanoparticles with Deeply-Penetrating Ultrasound Radiation for Tumor-Targeted Therapeutically Enhanced Anticancer Therapy

Reduction of Platinum(IV) Prodrug Hemoglobin Nanoparticles with Deeply‐Penetrating Ultrasound Radiation for Tumor‐Targeted Therapeutically Enhanced Anticancer Therapy

Angewandte Chemie International Edition

The development of PtIV prodrugs that are reduced into the therapeutically active PtII species within the tumor microenvironment has received much research interest. In order to provide spatial and temporal control over the treatment, there is a high demand for the development of compounds that could be selectively activated upon irradiation. Despite recent progress, the majority of PtIV complexes are excited with ultraviolet or blue light, limiting the use of such compounds for superficial application. To overcome this limitation, herein, the first example of PtIV prodrug nanoparticles that could be reduced with deeply penetrating ultrasound radiation is reported, enabling the treatment of deep-seated or large tumors. The nanoparticles were found to selectively accumulate inside a mouse colon carcinoma tumor upon intravenous injection as well as able to eradicate the tumor upon exposure to ultrasound radiation.

MHAMD-MST-CNN: multiscale head attention guided multiscale density maps fusion for video crowd counting via multi-attention spatial-temporal CNN

Angewandte Chemie

Visible-light-Absorbing, Photocatalysed C-N cross-coupling for synthesis of Hydrazones involving C(sp2)-H/C(sp3)-H functionalization

Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering Imaging & Visualization

Video-based crowd counting and density estimation (CCDE) is vital for crowd monitoring. The existing solutions lack in addressing issues like cluttered background and scale variation in crowd videos. To this end, a multiscale head attention-guided multiscale density maps fusion for video-based CCDE via multi-attention Spatial-Temporal CNN (MHAMD-MST-CNN) is proposed. The MHAMD-MST-CNN has three modules: a multi attention spatial stream (MASS), a multi attention temporal stream (MATS), and a final density map generation (FDMG) module. The spatial head attention modules (SHAMs) and temporal head attention modules (THAMs) are designed to eliminate the background influence from the MASS and the MATS, respectively, by mapping the multiscale spatial or temporal features to head maps. The multiscale de-backgrounded features are utilised by the density map generation (DMG) modules to generate multiscale density maps to deal with scale variation due to perspective distortion. The multiscale density maps are fused and fed into the FDMG module to obtain the final crowd density map. The MHAMD-MST-CNN has been trained and validated on three publicly available benchmark datasets: the Venice, the Mall, and the UCSD. The MHAMD-MST-CNN provides competitive results as compared with the state-of-the-arts in terms of mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE).

Clinically Deployable Bioelectronic Sensing Platform for Ultrasensitive Detection of Transferrin in Serum Sample

Chemical Communications

An efficient C-N cross-coupling approach for the synthesis of hydrazones was developed through C(sp2)-H and C(sp3)-H functionalization of indole and methylarene under visible light irradiation using photocatalyst eosin Y, ethanol:water as a green solvent and atmospheric air as an oxidant. With the aid of eosin Y, the C-H bonds of indole and methylarenes were activated followed by coupling with arylhydrazines. The procedure was applied to a wide variety of substrates with good functional group compatibility, offering a creative way to make hydrazones from inexpensive and easily accessible raw materials. The absence of metals, low cost, environmental friendliness, green solvent, non-toxicity, ease of handling, and utilization of renewable energy sources like visible light are some of this method's primary advantages.

Long-Term Modulation of Solar Cycles

Biosensors

Varying levels of transferrin (Tf) have been associated with different disease conditions and are known to play a crucial role in various malignancies. Regular monitoring of the variations in Tf levels can be useful for managing related diseases, especially for the prognosis of certain cancers. We fabricated an immunosensor based on graphene oxide (GO) nanosheets to indirectly detect Tf levels in cancer patients. The GO nanosheets were deposited onto an indium tin oxide (ITO)-coated glass substrate and annealed at 120 °C to obtain reduced GO (rGO) films, followed by the immobilization of an antibody, anti-Tf. The materials and sensor probe used were systematically characterized by UV–Visible spectroscopy (UV–Vis), X-ray diffraction (XRD), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Cyclic voltammetry (CV), electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), and differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) were also used for the stepwise sensor probe characterizations and Tf detection in serum samples, respectively. The anti-Tf/rGO/ITO immunosensor DPV output demonstrated an excellent Tf detection capability in the linear range of 0.1 mg mL−1 to 12 mg mL−1 compared to the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) detection range, with a limit of detection (LOD) of 0.010 ± 0.007 mg mL−1. Furthermore, the results of the fabricated immunosensor were compared with those of the ELISA and autobioanalyzer techniques, showing an outstanding match with < 5% error and demonstrating the immunosensor’s clinical potential.

Synthesis and in-vitro antibacterial behavior of curcumin conjugated gold nanoparticles

Space Science Reviews

Solar activity has a cyclic nature with the ≈11-year Schwabe cycle dominating its variability on the interannual timescale. However, solar cycles are significantly modulated in length, shape and magnitude, from near-spotless grand minima to very active grand maxima. The ≈400-year-long direct sunspot-number series is inhomogeneous in quality and too short to study robust parameters of long-term solar variability. The cosmogenic-isotope proxy extends the timescale to twelve millennia and provides crucial observational constraints of the long-term solar dynamo modulation. Here, we present a brief up-to-date overview of the long-term variability of solar activity at centennial – millennial timescales. The occurrence of grand minima and maxima is discussed as well as the existing quasi-periodicities such as centennial Gleissberg, 210-year Suess/de Vries and 2400-year Hallstatt cycles. It is shown that the solar cycles contain an important random component and have no clock-like phase locking implying a lack of long-term memory. A brief yet comprehensive review of the theoretical perspectives to explain the observed features in the framework of the dynamo models is presented, including the nonlinearity and stochastic fluctuations in the dynamo. We keep gaining knowledge of the processes driving solar variability with the new data acquainted and new models developed.

Investigation of time dependent growth of HepG2 cancerous cells using deep learning and shape metrics

Journal of Materials Chemistry B

Owing to the rise in multidrug-resistant bacterial diseases and the dwindling supply of newer antibiotics, it is crucial to discover newer compounds or modify current compounds for more effective antimicrobial therapies. According to reports, more than 80% of bacterial infections have been linked to bacterial biofilms. In addition to having antimicrobial properties, the hydrophobic polyphenol curcumin (Cur) also inhibits quorum sensing. The application of curcumin was constrained by its weak aqueous solubility and quick degradation. Over the past years, nanotechnology-based biomaterials with multi-functional characteristics have been engineered with high interest. The present study focused on the development of nano-biomaterials with excellent testifiers for bacterial infection in vitro. In this study, water dispersibility and stability of curcumin were improved through conjugation with gold nanoparticles. The successful synthesis of curcumin-conjugated gold nanoparticles (Cur-AuNPs) was confirmed using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and UV-vis absorbance spectroscopy. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) revealed an average particle size of about 10-13 nm. The antibacterial characteristics in terms of the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of Cur-AuNP treatments were found to be lowest than those with AuNPs and Cur treatments. The quantitative analysis revealed the superior antibacterial characteristics of Cur-AuNP-treated bacterial cells compared to the untreated samples. In addition, curcumin-conjugated AuNPs, produced more reactive oxygen species and increased the membrane permeability. Besides, the biocompatibility of Cur-AuNPs was also assessed quantitatively and qualitatively. Statistical analyses revealed the augmented MG-63 cell proliferation in Cur-AuNPs compared to those with Cur and AuNPs treatments. Overall, Cur-AuNPs exhibited enhanced antibacterial, and antibiofilm characteristics and cytocompatibility.

A Self-Aligned, Solution-Processed Low-Voltage Operated Organic Thin-Film Transistor for Ammonia Gas Sensing at Room Temperature

Preprint

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Jack Fredo

Study of growth of Human hepatocellular carcinoma cells (HepG2) cells provide useful information for clinical study of megestrol acetate for the treatment of Hepatocellular carcinoma. In this study, we analyzed the growth of HepG2 liver cancerous cells using image processing methods. Initially, the HepG2 cells were cultured and microscopic images were captured in bright field mode at time of seeding (00 h) followed by 06 h and 18 h. We segmented the cells using Tsallis and deep learning methods and the average size of colonies were calculated using shape metrics. Finally, we correlated the cell density obtained using MTT assay with the average size of colonies calculated from the Tsallis and deep learning segmented images. Results show that deep learning methods were able to segment the cells more precisely than Tsallis method. The average colony area calculated from the deep learning segmented images increases with time and concentration. The cell growth and adhesion pattern measured by deep leaning method showed good consistency with spectroscopic observations. The process pipeline provides a new way to assess cell adhesion and proliferation with capabilities in measuring their occupied surface area. The framework documented can be a promising tool to automate cancerous cell growth by evaluating average colony size for studying normal and pathological conditions.

Improving Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System for Indic Languages

IEEE Sensors Journal

In this article, a self-aligned, cost-efficient, fully solution-processed, low voltage operated high k dielectric-based p-channel organic thin film transistor (OTFT) has been developed and investigated for toxic ammonia analyte at RT (room temperature – 25 °C). A spin casting method has been utilized to deposit a high k dielectric, LaZrOx, on a p++ silicon substrate. The organic semiconductor channel deposition uses minimal wastage self-assembly floating film transfer method for P3HT growth over HMDS treated LaZrOx dielectric. The doping of lanthanum in ZrOx material reduces the charge traps and RMS surface roughness and also minimizes the other surface defects and carrier scattering at the dielectric interface. The solution-processed dielectric material is suitable for low voltage operated OTFT due to its high capacitance per unit area of 486 nF/cm 2 at 1 kHz and a low leakage current density of ~0.5× 10 -8 A/cm 2 at -2 V. Even at a low operating voltage of -2 V, the fabricated OTFT is capable of producing a good saturated current. The OTFT sensor results in a high response of 47% at 5 ppm NH 3 analyte and a low detection limit of 11.65 ppb. The developed sensor exhibits a low average response, recovery time of 9 sec. and 50 sec. and is almost independent of relative humidity variations in the range of 30% to 70%. The study reveals that this novel low-voltage OTFT device is capable of operating at -2 V and has shown a high sensitivity towards ammonia gas detection at RT.

Anti-nociceptive potential of an isatin-derived dual fatty acid amide hydrolase-monoacylglycerol lipase inhibitor

ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing

Machine Translation System (MTS) serves as an effective tool for communication by translating text or speech from one language to another language. Recently, neural machine translation (NMT) has emerged to be popular for its performance and cost-effectiveness. However, NMT systems are restricted in translating low-resource languages as it requires huge quantity of data set to learn useful mappings across languages. The need of an efficient translation system becomes obvious in a large multilingual environment like India. Indian Language (ILs) are still treated as low-resource languages due to unavailability of corpora. In order to address such asymmetric nature, multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) system evolves as an ideal approach in this direction. The MNMT converts many languages using a single model which are extremely useful in terms of training process and lowering online maintenance costs. It is also helpful for improving low-resource translation. In this paper, we propose a MNMT system to address the issues related to low-resource language translation. Our model comprises of two MNMT systems i.e. for English-Indic (one-to-many) and the other for Indic-English (many-to-one) with a shared encoder-decoder containing 15 language pairs (30 translation directions). Since most of IL pairs have scanty amount of parallel corpora, not sufficient for training any machine translation model, we explore various augmentation strategies to improve overall translation quality through the proposed model. A state-of-the-art transformer architecture is used to realize the proposed model. In addition, the paper addresses the use of language relationships (in terms of dialect, script, etc.), particularly about the role of high-resource languages of the same family in boosting the performance of low-resource languages. Moreover, the experimental results also show the advantage of backtranslation and domain adaptation for ILs to enhance the translation quality of both source and target languages. Using all these key approaches, our proposed model emerges to be more efficient than the baseline model in terms of evaluation metrics i.e BLEU (BiLingual Evaluation Understudy) score for a set of ILs.

Efficacy of surfactants in the sustainable restoration of the geotechnical properties of diesel-contaminated soil

Background: Recently, we have reported an isatin-derived carbohydrazone, 5-chloro-N'-(6-chloro-2-oxoindolin-3-ylidene)-2-hydroxybenzohydrazide (SIH 3) as dual nanomolar FAAH (fatty acid amide hydrolase)-MAGL (monoacylglycerol lipase) inhibitor with good CNS penetration and neuroprotective activity profile. In this study, we further investigated the pharmacological profile of compound SIH 3 in the neuropathic pain model along with acute toxicity and ex vivo studies. Methods: Chronic constrictive injury (CCI) was used to induce neuropathic pain in male Sprague-Dawley rats and the anti-nociceptive activity of the compound SIH 3 was investigated at 25, 50, and 100 mg/kg ip. Subsequently, locomotor activity was measured by rotarod and actophotometer experiments. The acute oral toxicity of the compound was assessed as per the OECD guidelines 423. Results: Compound SIH 3 showed significant anti-nociceptive activity in the CCI-induced neuropathic pain model without altering the locomotor activity. Furthermore, compound SIH 3 showed an excellent safety profile (up to 2000 mg/kg, po) in the acute oral toxicity study and was also non-hepatotoxic. Further, ex vivo studies revealed that the compound SIH 3 produces a significant antioxidant effect in oxidative stress induced by CCI. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that the investigated compound SIH 3 has the potential to be developed as an anti-nociceptive agent.

Anticancer Screening of Ru(II) Photoredox Catalysts at Single Cell Level

International journal of Environmental Science and Technology

In this study, an evaluation of washing-based treatment for diesel-contaminated soil using non-ionic surfactants such as Tween-20, NP-9.5, and Triton X-100 at 5% (v/v) dosage for three days of washing in removing diesel as well as improvement of geotechnical properties was performed. The initial diesel content of 0.8 mg/g was identified using the gravimetric method in the soil. The geotechnical test results of the surfactant-washed diesel-contaminated soil show an increase in shear strength, a decrease in compression, and swelling. The contaminated and treated soil samples are also subjected to instrumental techniques like X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier transform infrared radiation (FTIR). On analyzing the results from FTIR spectra, NP-9.5 is found to be the most efficient surfactant in removing the diesel. This study establishes that surfactant-aided soil washing is a prospective method for enhanced removal of diesel and leads to significant improvement in geotechnical properties of the treated soil.

Experimental, modeling and RSM optimization of CO2 loading for an aqueous blend of diethylenetriamine and 3-dimethyl amino-1-propanol

Chemistry - An Asian Journal

The rapid efflux of Pt‐based chemotherapeutics by cancer cells is one of the major causes of drug resistance in clinically available drugs. Therefore, both the high cellular uptake as well as adequate retention efficiency of an anticancer agent are important factors to overcome drug resistance. Unfortunately, rapid and efficient quantification of metallic drug concentration in individual cancer cells still remains a tricky problem. Herein, with the help of newly developed single cell inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (SC‐ICPMS), we have found that the well‐known Ru(II)‐based complex, Ru3, displayed remarkable intracellular uptake and retention efficiency in every single cancer cell with high photocatalytic therapeutic activity to overcome cisplatin resistance. Moreover, Ru3 has shown sensational photocatalytic anticancer properties with excellent in‐vitro and in‐vivo biocompatibility under light exposure.

Electrochemical Nano-Imprinting of Trimetallic Dendritic Surface for Ultrasensitive Detection of Cephalexin in Pharmaceutical Formulations

Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering

Post-combustion CO2 capture by aqueous amine solvent is one of the most promising methods for mitigating the presence of CO2 in the environment. In this work, a novel amine blend of Diethylenetriamine and 3-Dimethyl amino-1-propanol was selected. Experiments were performed in the temperature range of 293.15–323.25 K, mole fraction of diethylenetriamine in the range of 0.05–0.2, partial pressure of CO2 in the range of 10.13–25.33 kPa and solution concentration in the range of 1–3 mol·L−1. Effects of these parameters on equilibrium CO2 loading were judged at various operating conditions. An empirical model was developed for the calculation of equilibrium CO2 loading in the aqueous amine blend. The heat of absorption of CO2 for this amine blend was found to be −65.22 kJ·mol−1. Response surface methodology (RSM) was used for optimization and a quadratic model was selected. The analysis of variance was used to prove the significance of the selected model. Three-dimensional diagrams and contour plots of independent variables were also shown. Optimum CO2 loading by RSM was found to be 1.068 mol CO2·mol amine−1 at temperature 294.15 K, mole fraction of diethylenetriamine 0.20, solution concentration 1.3 mol/l, and partial pressure of CO2 24.22 kPa.

Investigation of the Synergistic Effect in Polypyrrole/Ni-Doped NASICON Composites for an Enhanced Hydrogen Evolution Reaction

Pharmaceutics

Cephalexin (CFX), a first-generation cephalosporin, is used to treat various infectious diseases. Although antibiotics have achieved considerable progress in the eradication of infectious diseases, their incorrect and excessive usage has contributed to various side effects, such as mouth soreness, pregnancy-related pruritus, and gastrointestinal symptoms, including nausea, epigastric discomfort, vomiting, diarrhoea, and haematuria. In addition to this, it also causes antibiotic resistance, one of the most pressing problems in the medical field. The World Health Organization (WHO) claims that cephalosporins are currently the most commonly used drugs for which bacteria have developed resistance. Hence, it is crucial to detect CFX in complex biological matrices in a highly selective and sensitive way. In view of this, a unique trimetallic dendritic nanostructure comprised of cobalt, copper, and gold was electrochemically imprinted on an electrode surface by optimising the electrodeposition variables. The dendritic sensing probe was thoroughly characterised using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, chronoamperometry, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, and linear sweep voltammetry. The probe displayed superior analytical performance, with a linear dynamic range between 0.05 nM and 105 nM, limit of detection of 0.04 ± 0.01 nM, and response time of 4.5 ± 0.2 s. The dendritic sensing probe displayed minimal response to interfering compounds, such as glucose, acetaminophen, uric acid, aspirin, ascorbic acid, chloramphenicol, and glutamine, which usually occur together in real matrices. In order to check the feasibility of the surface, analysis of a real sample was carried out using the spike and recovery approach in pharmaceutical formulations and milk samples, yielding current recoveries of 93.29–99.77% and 92.66–98.29%, respectively, with RSD < 3.5%. It only took around 30 min to imprint the surface and analyse the CFX molecule, making it a quick and efficient platform for drug analysis in clinical settings.

A mechanistic analysis of spontaneous cancer remission phenomenon: identification of genomic basis and effector biomolecules for therapeutic applicability

Energy & Fuels

Electrocatalysts with a synergistic combination of low-cost, eco-friendly, and highly electrochemical active properties are frequently used in hydrogen evolution reactions (HERs) without utilizing any noble or toxic metals. Herein, a simple chemical oxidative polymerization method has been used to synthesize a set of nanocomposites of polypyrrole (PPy) and Ni-doped NASICON-structured Na3NixFe(2–x)(PO4)(SO4)2 [NFPS(Nix)], which shows remarkable HER activity. Among them, as-synthesized uniform spherical-shaped PPy/NFPS(Ni0.5) (optimized ratio) was found to show the lowest onset overpotential, −13 mV versus reversible hydrogen electrode (RHE), with a lesser Tafel slope of 58 mV dec–1, which is comparable to Pt/C and superior among the majority of the polymer-based HER catalysts. Also, it offers a current density of 10 mA/cm2 at a noticeably lower overpotential of −111 mV versus RHE. Moreover, the nanocomposite also exhibits notable long-sustaining environmental and catalytic stability along with exceptional durability. In PPy/NFPS(Ni0.5), improved electrocatalytic activity comes from the synergistic effect of the NFPS(Ni0.5) and PPy matrix, which results in enormous electrocatalytically active sites and facilitates easy charge transportation. Thus, real-world hydrogen production may hold possibilities for the as-synthesized PPy/NFPS(Ni0.5) nanocomposite as well as an alternative to a Pt-based electrocatalyst for the HER.