Department of Bioscience & Bioengineering

&ldquo;IIT Jodhpur is committed to impart quality education to facilitate the creation of qualified, competent and responsible human resources to meet the emerging technological challenges of the world. It is working towards creating an equitable learning platform that is positive, accessible and effective in the face of the modern societal and scientific advancements.

Flexibility in curriculum, in all its academic programs, encompassing elements of teaching, research, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship is the most unique feature of IIT Jodhpur. The Department of Science and Technology (DST), under the National Mission on Cyber Physical Systems, has identified IIT Jodhpur as a Technology &amp; Innovation Hub in the area of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The institute has also been nominated as the coordinator for the Jodhpur City and Knowledge Cluster by the Office of Principal Scientific Adviser, Government of India.

The sprawling 852-acre IIT Jodhpur campus is a majestic tribute to the deep-rooted diverse cultural heritage of the region. The campus is an architectural masterpiece, which is slated to become an international exemplar of sustainability with net-zero energy, and advanced water and waste management strategies.&rdquo;

IIT Jodhpur

Emerging concepts in the construction of nanostructures hold immense potential in the areas of drug delivery and targeting. Such nanoscopic assemblies/structures, similar to natural proteins and self-associating systems, may lead to the formation of programmable soft structures with expanded drug delivery options and the capability to circumvent first-pass metabolism. This article aims to illustrate key recent developments and innovative bioinspired design paradigms pertaining to peptide-containing self-assembled tubular and vesicular soft structures. Soft structures are composed of components that self-assemble to reveal diverse morphologies stabilized by weak, noncovalent interactions. Morphological properties of such structures and their ability to encapsulate drugs, biologicals and bioactive small molecules, with the promise of targeted delivery, are discussed. © 2007 Bentham Science Publishers Ltd.

World University root node

Medicinal Chemistry

Peptide-based soft materials as potential drug delivery vehicles

Mechanical energy has been used in the detection of shallow buried objects in granular beds for more than half a century. Here we attempt to answer a fundamental question - at what depths would an object be detectable in an idealized, close-packed, granular bed made of monosized elastic spheres? Systematic particle dynamics based studies reveal the effects of varying the area across which the impulse is generated, object size, and restitution on locating the buried object. © 2007 American Institute of Physics.

Applied Physics Letters

Detection of shallow inclusions in closed-packed granular beds using mechanical impulses

We consider a chain of elastic beads, in which the individual grains repel upon contact according to the non-linear Hertz potential. We further assume that the chain is under zero loading, i.e., the grains barely touch one another. We show via careful numerical solution of the equations of motion that an impulse propagates as a solitary wave and that the collision of identical solitary waves propagating in opposite directions along the chain spawns a hierarchy of multiple weak solitary waves. We mention that the generated baby waves eventually must lead to a "volatile" equilibrium-like state, which we refer to as the quasi-equilibrium state. © 2007 THE PHYSICAL SOCIETY OF THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA.

Chinese Journal of Physics

Interaction of solitary waves in confined granular alignments and the quasi-equilibrium state

A glycine-rich, short pentapeptide conjugate 6, derived from the highly conserved copper-binding octarepeat region of the prion protein, exhibits a tendency to self-aggregate in a time-dependent fashion. Aging of 6 afforded an insight into the phased growth of spherical prefibrillar structures to fibers of long persistence length, as observed by a combination of microscopic techniques. Interestingly, growth of these fibers was inhibited by colchicine, a known inhibitor of microtubule polymerization in a concentration dependent fashion. This study offers an intriguing insight into the occurrence of prefibrillar intermediates on the path to the formation of full length peptide fibers. It is also envisaged that constructs such as 6 may also serve as simple models to study chemical intervention of protein aggregation. © 2007 American Chemical Society.

Journal of Physical Chemistry B

Phased fiber growth in a peptide conjugate: Aggregation and disaggregation studies

Winning the three-legged race: Rapid self-organization of a tripodal aromatic dipeptide conjugate on a tris(2-amino-ethyl)amine scaffold leads to a vesicular morphology (upper image). The structures can trap a fluorescent dye (lower image) and release it upon acidification, suggesting the use of such stimuli-responsive materials as potential delivery vehicles. (Figure Presented). © 2007 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

Angewandte Chemie - International Edition

Bioinspired design of nanocages by self-assembling triskelion peptide elements

Here we address the problem of remotely interrogating the shallow subsurface of soil using low power mechanical energy transmission and sensing the subsequent backscattering from the soil bed to find small buried objects at very shallow depths (∼ 15 cm or less). The effort is geared towards the development of better technologies for the remote detection and imaging of buried land mines, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and other undesirable objects. We present our studies against the backdrop of what is known in this field today. Our ongoing work is briefly summarized with an outline of the underlying physics of acoustic backscattering from shallow buried objects and of how such backscattering can be inexpensively and remotely detected and interpreted for possible use in automated mine clearance operations. ©2007 IEEE.

2007 IEEE North-East Workshop on Circuits and Systems, NEWCAS 2007

Acoustic interrogation of soil and possible remote detection of shallow buried inclusions

Pleurotus ostreatus, also known as oyster mushroom, is studied for its immunomodulatory and anticancer properties. The present study aimed to find a bioactive proteoglycan from a fruiting body of P. ostreatus that could be used as a biological response modifier for immunomodulatory and anticancer effects with the fewest side effects. A water-soluble fraction of alcohol-precipitated fruiting body extract was purified through anion and cation exchange chromatography, followed by gel filtration (Sephadex G-100) chromatography. The purified proteoglycan fraction was represented by the polysaccharide-to-protein ratio of 3.46. The monosaccharide composition analysis of the proteoglycan showed the presence of galactose, mannose, and glucose in the ratio of 12:11:10. The fraction was examined for its immunomodulatory and anticancer effects in a mouse Sarcoma-180 model. The purified proteoglycan stimulated the growth of thymocytes and splenocytes and induced interleukin-4 and interferon gamma in vitro. It also activated macrophages to produce nitric oxide, super oxide anion, and hydrogen peroxide. The growth inhibition of Sarcoma-180 cells both in vivo and in vitro by this proteoglycan fraction was significant and arrested cell cycle in G0/G1 phase. © 2007 by Begell House, Inc.

International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms

Immunomodulatory and antitumor activities of water-soluble proteoglycan isolated from the fruiting bodies of culinary-medicinal oyster mushroom Pleurotus ostreatus (Jacq.: Fr.) P. Kumm. (agaricomycetideae)

An energy pulse refers to a spatially compact energy bundle. In nonlinear pulse propagation, the nonlinearity of the relevant dynamical equations could lead to pulse propagation that is nondispersive or weakly dispersive in space and time. Nonlinear pulse propagation through layered media with widely varying pulse transmission properties is not wave-like and a problem of broad interest in many areas such as optics, geophysics, atmospheric physics and ocean sciences. We study nonlinear pulse propagation through a semi-infinite sequence of layers where the layers can have arbitrary energy transmission properties. By assuming that the layers are rigid, we are able to develop exact expressions for the backscattered energy received at the surface layer. The present study is likely to be relevant in the context of energy transport through soil and similar complex media. Our study reveals a surprising connection between the problem of pulse propagation and the number patterns in the well known Pascal's and Catalan's triangles and hence provides an analytic benchmark in a challenging problem of broad interest. We close with comments on the relationship between this study and the vast body of literature on the problem of wave localization in disordered systems. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Annals of Physics

Exact solution to the problem of nonlinear pulse propagation through random layered media and its connection with number triangles

We revisit the dynamical behavior of particles in a chain of spherical elastic grains, where the system is assumed to be placed in such a way that the grains suffer progressive loading as function of depth due to the presence of the gravitational acceleration g. Here we address, for the first time, the dynamics of the surface grain in this rather well studied problem (see [R.S. Sinkovits, S. Sen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 74 (1995) 2686; J. Hong, J.Y. Ji, H. Kim, Phys. Rev. Lett. 82 (1999) 3058]) and make predictions that may be verified experimentally by monitoring the dynamics of a single edge grain. When g → 0, the surface grain dynamics can be associated with the problem of propagation of solitary waves in the chain. When g > 0, the dynamics of the surface grain turns out to be dramatically different, reflective of the very different dynamics exhibited by the grains in a gravitationally loaded chain. As we shall see, these studies provide a necessary first step towards developing an understanding of a difficult but important problem in physics and engineering - namely, the dynamics of the surface grains of a gravitationally loaded close-packed granular bed. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena

A numerical study of the dynamics of the surface grain in a granular chain and the role of gravity

Experiments show that perturbation by an incident striker can generate solitary wave trains in unloaded, monodispersed elastic sphere alignments (Lazaridi A. N. and Nesterenko V. F., Prikl. Mekh. Tekh. Fiz., 3 (1985) 115). We report the first dynamical studies in the elastic regime that confirm and extend upon the results obtained in existing experiments and define the conditions for which controlled generation of solitary wave trains may be possible. Copyright © EPLA, 2007.