Indian Science and Technology Developments : Updates and Discussions

vingensys said:
Any more information, regarding whether EMS or EDS? And the current achieved max speed. The article appeared a bit sketchy
Click to expand...
Nothing else is available unfortunately. Its still in very early stages, so details are sketchy at best. You could look for publications from the RRCAT to see if it mentions something on it.
 
India is world's third largest producer of scientific articles: Report

PTI | Dec 18, 2019, 03.40 PM IST
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WASHINGTON: With over 1.35 lakh scientific papers published, India has become the world's third largest publisher of science and engineering articles, according to a US government agency data, topped by China.

As per the statistics compiled by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the number of scientific papers published worldwide increased from 1,755,850 in 2008 to 2,555,959 in 2018.

The global research output, as measured by peer-reviewed science and engineering (S&E) journal articles and conference papers, grew about four per cent annually over the last 10 years.

The data, which was released on Tuesday, stated that in 2008, India published 48,998 science and engineering articles. This increased to 1,35,788 articles in 2018 at an average annual growth rate of 10.73 per cent and the country now accounts for 5.31 per cent of the total world publications in science and engineering.

China, which accounts for 20.67 per cent of all global publications in scientific articles, is at the top position, followed by the US at 16.54 per cent.

In China, the number of global scientific publications increased from 2,49,049 in 2008 to 5,28,263 in 2018, at a growth rate of 7.81 per cent per annum.

The US, the total global publications in science and engineering articles grew at a rate of 0.71 per cent from 3,93,979 in 2008 to 4,22,808 in 2018.

Though a long way to go, as compared to the US and China in terms of the number of scientific article publications, India's emergence as third largest publisher is mainly due to a phenomenal double-digit growth rate in the last one decade from 2008 to 2018, the report noted.

The other countries which made it to the top 10 list are Germany (1,04,396), Japan (98,793), UK (97,681), Russia (81,579), Italy (71,240), South Korea (66,376) and France (66,352).

According to the report, China's rate of research output has grown almost twice as fast as the world's annual average for the last 10 years, while the output of the US and the European Union (EU) has grown at less than half the world's annual growth rate.

Research papers from the US and the EU continue to have the most impact; however, China has shown a rapid increase in producing impactful publications, as measured by references to journal articles and conference papers.

Specialisation in scientific fields differs among countries, with the US, the EU and Japan more specialised in health sciences and China and India more specialised in engineering, as measured by journal articles and conference papers.

"China and India have increased their share of the growing world output," the report said.

China produced five per cent of the global output in 2000 and grew to 21 per cent in 2018; India's share rose from two per cent to five per cent during this period.

"Among the 15 largest publication producers, countries with higher than average growth rates include South Korea (four per cent), Brazil (five per cent), China (eight per cent), Russia (10 per cent), India (11 per cent) and Iran (11 per cent)," the report said.

India is world's third largest producer of scientific articles: Report
 
Indian scientists stir Tuberculosis breakthrough hope

The implications are extensive and open up the possibility of therapeutic intervention of latent (dormant) TB

By G.S. Mudur.
Published: 28/10/19, 4:49 AM
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Gobardhan Das (centre) with research scholar Samreen Fatima (left) and collaborator Anand Ranganathan at JNU. (Picture sourced by correspondent)

Indian scientists have discovered how tuberculosis bacteria hide themselves in the human body and proposed novel strategies that they hope will cure the disease within a month, compared with the six months that the current standard treatment takes.

Their findings challenge a longstanding dogma about tuberculosis infections and suggest that adding a statin-like molecule or immuno-suppressant medicine to current anti-TB treatment may help eliminate the tubercular bacteria, known to persist in the body for years.

These scientists from AIIMS and JNU in New Delhi have shown that tubercular bacilli invade a type of stem cells -– called mesenchymal stem cells -– where they stop replicating, slip into a dormant state and shield themselves from any antibiotics.

Infectious disease specialist Gobardhan Das and his colleagues at the JNU school of molecular medicine are the first to unravel the role of mesenchymal stem cells in persistent TB infections. They published their findings on Friday in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Researchers have known for decades that TB bacteria infect certain cells in the body called macrophages where they survive and replicate, getting primed to cause the disease and the symptoms when the immune system falters.

“We’ve found that the TB bacteria hijack the genetic machinery of mesenchymal stem cells and hide within tiny lipid (fat) droplets inside the stem cells, safe from the immune system and safe from antibiotics during anti-TB treatment,” said Das, the study’s principal investigator.

Scientists who have reviewed the work but are not associated with it have described the findings as “striking and innovative” and as a potential “breakthrough” that points towards novel treatment strategies.

“This (study) challenges established dogma and convincingly demonstrates that while macrophages are the natural host for replicating bacteria, mesenchymal stem cells are the natural host for dormant bacilli,” an anonymous reviewer wrote.

“The implications are extensive and open up the possibility of therapeutic intervention of latent (dormant) TB. This therefore represents a major breakthrough.”

Standard anti-TB treatment involves the use of four antibiotics and takes six months or even longer. Most of the tubercular bacilli are cleared from the body within three to four weeks, but a small fraction persists in a dormant state and poses the risk of relapse and drug-resistant TB.

The AIIMS-JNU scientists have in their laboratory studies demonstrated two ways to eliminate the dormant TB bacilli from the stem cells.

In one set of experiments, they found that a molecule called Triacsin-C that blocks fat synthesis could prevent the formation of the protective lipid droplets.

In another, they showed that an immuno-suppressant drug called rapamycin induced in the stem cells a natural waste-ejection process called autophagy, leading to the death of the dormant TB bacilli in the stem cells.

Luc Van Kaer, professor of microbiology at the Vanderbilt University in the US who collaborated with the Indian scientists, said the findings were significant because they suggested potential new therapies that could “chase the bacteria out of their hiding place”.

Scientists, however, have cautioned that although the AIIMS-JNU team has conducted studies in mice, what works in mice may not necessarily work in humans.

The other members of the study team were research scholars Samreen Fatima, Shashank Shivaji, and Depapriya Bhattacharya at the JNU, Santosh Kumar at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, New Delhi, and faculty members Sujata Mohanty at AIIMS and Anand Ranganathan at JNU.

Tuberculosis remains a big public health challenge in India.

Over 2.6 million persons developed TB and about 440,000 died from the infection in India during 2018, according to World Health Organisation estimates based on consultations with Indian health authorities.

A senior biologist with expertise on TB bacteria said the "take-home message" from the AIIMS-JNU research is the possibility of strategies to treat persistent bacteria that lie dormant within mesenchymal stem cells.

"While the standard anti-TB regimen can eliminate active and replicating TB in macrophages, autophagy-inducing drugs such as rapamycin will hopefully result in total elimination of bacteria," Seyed Hasnain, professor of molecular medicine and vice-chancellor at the Jamia Hamdard University, New Delhi, told The Telegraph.

Hasnain, collaborating with scientists in Hyderabad and Germany, had four years ago proposed that mesenchymal stem cells while providing a safe “resting place” for TB bacteria may also serve as “couriers” transporting the bacteria to different parts of the body leading to non-lung TB.

"These new laboratory findings are wonderful, very encouraging," Hasnain said. "But there is need to conduct human clinical trials to take this otherwise excellent study to its logical conclusions."

Indian scientists stir Tuberculosis breakthrough hope
 
Designing drugs for the deadly Nipah virus

By Shambhavi Chidambaram
Bengaluru, Dec 13, 2019
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Pune researchers take a molecular modelling approach to identify drug targets for the virus.

In 1998 in Malaysia, nearly 300 people were diagnosed with acute encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, in what was the first known outbreak of the deadly Nipah virus, and 109 deaths occurred. A couple of years later, the virus had made its way to the Indian subcontinent with outbreaks in both Bangladesh and India. Those afflicted experienced fever, headaches, vomiting, and the potentially fatal complication of encephalitis. In 2018, 21 out of the 23 people, it infected in Kerala, died. The Nipah virus is not only transmitted between humans but also from animals to humans—fruit bats and pigs, in particular, are known reservoirs of the virus.

Despite the threat of an epidemic, there is as yet no effective cure for the Nipah virus, and drug development is a desperately long and complicated process. A sound understanding of the biochemistry of the virus and how drug molecules interact with and inhibit its proliferation is necessary as a first step. In a recent study, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Pune (IISER Pune) have used a computational approach to solve this problem. Their findings have been published in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, funded by the Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance, Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

The Nipah virus is an RNA virus, meaning its genetic material is RNA, surrounded by a protein envelope. Like all viruses, it can only make copies of itself by invading and hijacking the machinery of a host cell, destroying the latter in the process. The virus' protein envelope is made of six structural proteins, and its RNA produces three more proteins to defend itself from the responses of the host cells. Any of these proteins could be targeted by a drug to stop the virus in its tracks.

The researchers of the current study used the genetic sequence of the Malaysian strain of the Nipah virus, and the structure of proteins from a related virus to construct computer models of the protein structures. These models were then used to design 'peptide inhibitors'—short chains of amino acids that could directly interfere with the molecular mechanisms of the viral proteins. For example, one of the virus's structural proteins - the G protein - binds to receptors on the host cell, essential to gain entry into the cell. The two inhibitors the researchers designed for the G protein were intended to disrupt this binding process.

The researchers screened thousands of drug-like molecules for their ability to bind to and inhibit the virus as a whole. The drug-likeness of a molecule is a qualitative estimate of how biologically effective it is, based on criteria like its size and specific chemical properties. The researchers first identified plausible points for the molecules to attach to the virus: drug targets, in other words. They then used two different programs to virtually fix the molecules to the virus. A selection of those molecules that had the best fit yielded ten compounds that could inhibit three of the six structural proteins.

Furthermore, a comparison of the genetic sequences of 15 strains of viruses from across Bangladesh, Malaysia and India revealed that those parts of the proteins that would directly interact with the drug molecule were not effectively different across these strains. This is good news: if only some of the strains were susceptible to the potential drug molecules, drug resistance might more easily spread from those that are immune to the susceptible strains.

The structures of the molecules modelled in this paper and various details of the modelling procedures are archived and freely available here, with cartoon models of the molecules that even a non-specialist might view and appreciate.

"We conclude that it is highly likely that the proposed inhibitors would be potent against all strains of the virus Nipah and other related zoonotic viruses that pose a serious epidemic threat," the researchers say.​

A computational approach to drug development can save a great deal of time and financial resources in the early stages of the process by narrowing down targets for further investigation. The experimental validation of these promising theoretical results would be the next step.

Source : Predicting and designing therapeutics against the Nipah virus

Designing drugs for the deadly Nipah virus
 
IIT-B makes a breakthrough in CAR T-cell therapy to help cancer patients

Dec 13, 2019 18:11:08 IST
By Myupchar
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Ongoing research at IIT Bombay may pave the way for CAR T-cell therapy to become a possible treatment for cancer patients in India. Professor Rahul Purwar of the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering launched the startup ImmunoACT four years ago to address the unavailability of the therapy in India. CAR T-cell therapy is available in the US from pharmacological giants Novartis and Gilead, but the costs involved are massive at Rs 3-4 crores per treatment. The researchers at IIT-B, in collaboration with Tata Memorial Hospital, have developed a therapy that will be much cheaper. According to estimates, treatment costs would be comparatively low at Rs 15 lakhs.

CAR T-cell therapy and how it works

Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell therapy (CAR T) is a new form of cancer immunotherapy wherein the body’s T cells (which are white blood cells involved in the body’s immune response) are modified by gene insertion to recognize and attack cancer cells. Here is a simplified version of the process :
  • Extracting the T-cells: the patient is hooked to an apheresis machine which filters the blood and extracts T-cells from it. The blood is then returned to the body.
  • T-cell modification: the antibody CAR is inserted into the DNA of the T-cell. This antibody is responsible for the immune response that targets specific types of cancer.
  • Cell multiplication: the CAR T-cells are allowed to multiply in a lab until they are in the millions and then frozen. The patient may be given chemotherapy while this part of the process takes place.
  • Modified cell re-introduction: the modified cells are then pumped back into the bloodstream and act as ‘attacker’ cells by targeting the cancer cells in the body.
Suitable candidates for CAR T-cell therapy

Called a ‘living drug’, the cells remain in the body and replicate, and if successful, kill off malignant cancer cells. The therapy has thus far been used for various types of leukaemia (blood cancer) and certain types of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Research is ongoing on cancers of the cervix, mouth, throat and lung, among others.

CAR T-cell therapy is recommended for those cases where the response to other treatments has been limited - it is not yet a preferred treatment. Based on extrapolations from various cancer hospitals, the treatment will affect roughly 20,000 to 40,000 people suffering from leukaemia and lymphoma per year.

Prognosis and side effects

Initial results, particularly with leukaemia, have been encouraging. About 80% of those who received treatment went into remission. While this is an exciting development, research on the therapy is still limited and further work needs to be done to understand its potential and limitations.

Approximately 40-60% of those who undergo treatment have side effects. They are not usually serious, but can on occasion turn life-threatening especially within the first week of treatment. They include flu-like symptoms such as headaches, nausea and joint pain. There can also be neurological symptoms such as seizures, short-term memory loss and cardiovascular issues such as elevated blood pressure.

Tackling the expensive cost of CAR T-cell therapy

“The molecular structure of our product is different,” Professor Purwar explained over the phone. ImmunoACT has two patents pending on their technology; they have developed a CAR T-cell platform that attacks CD19+ B-cell malignancies which are expressed in certain types of leukaemia.

“Manufacturing costs are extremely high with this form of cell therapy. More than half of the cost goes to skilled manpower. The processes involved are highly technical and complex, and investments are risky. High costs prevail,” Prof. Purwar said.

Manufacturing costs will be lower in the startup’s model as scientists will be trained on the platform. Additionally, the new patent-pending technology will also lower costs. Lab work conducted so far has suggested that a single dose may cause a sufficient immune response.

IIT-B hopes to start clinical trials next year. This first requires getting permission from the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI), however.

Another player in the field

Bangalore based Immuneel Therapeutics, owned by Kiran Mazumdar’s Biocon has also entered the race to harness CAR T-cell technology and make it readily available. Partnered with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, the business model of the venture is different from ImmunoACT’s. Immuneel will in-license the technologies and cut costs by streamlining the engineering and delivery process. The company will provide training to hospitals and provide the therapy in a fee-for-service model. Mazumdar says that the company is not committed to any particular technology; it is more about delivering the service cost-effectively and efficiently. The company hopes to infuse its first patient by September next year.

There are many reasons to be excited about the emerging field of immunotherapy in the country. The involvement of startups and the push to make the technology native will hopefully make the therapy available to those who need it. Cancer burden in the country is increasing and these advances will play a key role in saving lives.

IIT-B makes a breakthrough in CAR T-cell therapy to help cancer patients - Firstpost
 
Healing graphene: Scientists at IISc devise a way to reverse defects in graphene

By Nandita Mohandas
Bengaluru Dec 18, 2019,
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Graphene, a sheet-like form of carbon, has been hailed as a wonder material owing to its many promising applications in electronics, drug delivery and more. In a recent study, a team of scientists from India and the USA, led by Prof Srinivasan Raghavan and Prof Rudra Pratap from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, has paved the way for new applications of graphene by intentionally varying the defects formed during its production.

Graphene is commonly produced using a technique called chemical vapour deposition (CVD) in which metals such as copper and platinum are exposed to hydrocarbons like ethane and methane. These hydrocarbons decompose and deposit on the metal substrate, forming a film. The graphene produced by this method inevitably develops defects called grain boundaries, in its crystal structure. Changes in the grain boundaries change the mechanical, electrical and other properties of the material. In the current study, done as part of Mr Krishna Bharadwaj’s PhD, the researchers have come up with a novel mechanism to create and heal the defects in the grain boundaries of graphene in a reversible manner. In doing so they have created graphene with one of the highest reported room temperature electronic mobilities till date.

“This work has the potential to find use in a broad spectrum of industries. It could range from terahertz electronics, which benefit from the high electron mobility in graphene, to even packaging industries which require near-zero permeability of water attainable by graphene layer coating,” says Prof Srinivasan Raghavan.​

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, was funded by the Department of Science and Technology and the Thematic Unit of Excellence for Nano Science and Technology project.

The researchers studied graphene samples produced by CVD on a copper surface in different ways. The first sample was grown by keeping all the reaction conditions for the growth of graphene a constant. After some time, they observed a completely covered film of graphene on the copper sheet using a scanning electron microscope. They measured the changes in electrical properties, such as charge mobility and sheet resistance, of this film and compared them to the values for the other three samples.

In the second sample, the researchers initially had the conditions that drive the growth of graphene a constant until the copper surface was covered entirely with graphene film. Then they raised a reaction condition called the carbon potential to a slightly higher value. The values of the electrical properties then showed an increase over the first sample.

The third sample was initially grown like the second one. But, after a higher value of carbon potential was reached, it was lowered back again to the initial value. The electrical properties initially increased and then decreased, tracing back the previous rise, demonstrating reversible behaviour.

Any chemical reaction can be influenced by two types of factors — kinetic factors, which are related to the speed of the reaction, and thermodynamic factors related to its energy requirements. Depending on which of the two plays a significant role, a reaction can be called 'kinetically controlled' or 'thermodynamically controlled' reaction. The reversible nature of the phenomena confirmed it was thermodynamically controlled in the case of graphene growth.

“The growth of atomic layers is not as easy as it seems,” said Prof. Raghavan. “A thermodynamic lever improves our capability to control growth,” he added. ​

Further, the researchers made a replica of the graphene structures on a germanium film to visualise the defects in the graphene film. To do this, they allowed water to pass through the graphene film by placing a water droplet on top. Since water can only permeate through the defective grain boundaries and not any other part of the graphene layer, using optical and atomic force microscopy, they observed the impression of water along the grain boundaries. They found that most of the defects of the graphene layer lie in the grain boundaries, confirming that the changes in the electrical values are occurring due to the decrease and increase in the grain boundary defects.

“If graphene could make paper impermeable to water, then it can be a substitute for plastic and hence could solve many of the garbage problems that we are facing today. That is a challenging problem, and we are working on it,” adds Dr Srinivasan Raghavan as an exciting problem close to his heart.​

This article has been run past the researchers, whose work is covered, to ensure accuracy.

Source: Reversible defect engineering in graphene grain boundaries

Healing graphene: Scientists at IISc devise a way to reverse defects in graphene
 
IIT Hyderabad Researchers Unravel Working Of Protein That Repairs Damaged DNA

By IANS - Dec 27 2019, 3:28 pm
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IIT Hyderabad (Website/IIT Hyderabad)

The Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, (IIT-H) on Thursday (26 December) claimed that its researchers had unravelled working of a protein that repaired damaged DNA.

According to the IIT-H, any damage to DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) can cause from sudden appearance of a harmless mole to catastrophic diseases like cancer.

Nature has evolved techniques to not only protect DNA but also to repair damaged one to avert catastrophic outcomes. In humans, one such repair mechanism involves activation of a special class of proteins, called 'DNA repair proteins'.

With the increasing awareness about impact of DNA damage, efforts are being made worldwide to understand how these repair proteins work, both as an academic exercise as well as the foundation for therapeutic interventions.

DNA is a self-replicating material, which is present in nearly all living organisms as the main constituent of chromosomes, and is the carrier of genetic information.

The DNA integrity is essential for proper function and survival of most organisms. Protection of DNA is daunting because of the possibility of damages due to external sources as well as the intrinsic instability of DNA itself.

"Our laboratory seeks to understand the working of DNA damage repair proteins. Certain types of chemicals produced naturally in the body can damage DNA and, if not fixed early, may trigger cell death," said Anindya Roy, Associate Professor, Department of Biotechnology, IIT-H.

The institute has discovered the mechanism by which these repair proteins assemble when DNA is under threat. The researchers studied the action of one specific protein, called alkB homolog 3 (ALKBH3).

It has been known that ALKBH3 repairs alkylated DNA containing 1-methyladenosine and 3-methylcytosine through oxidative demethylation, but the mechanism has hitherto remained unclear. The research team has unraveled the mechanism by which ALKBH3 brings about demethylation.

"We have found ALKBH3 has a direct protein-protein interaction with another protein, called RAD51C, and this interaction stimulates ALKBH3-mediated repair of methyl-adduct located within 3'- tailed DNA," Roy said.

The results of the study, conducted in collaboration with Arun Goyal, Professor at the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, IIT-Guwahati, has recently been published in Nucleic Acid Research, a peer-reviewed journal.

The paper has been co-authored by Anindya Roy, Arun Goyal and research scholars -- Monisha Mohan, Deepa Akula and Arun Dhillon.

"The knowledge gained from our studies might, in the long term, be beneficial from a cancer therapeutic perspective," Roy said.

(This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.)

IIT Hyderabad Researchers Unravel Working Of Protein That Repairs Damaged DNA
 
Scientists develop cheaper catalysts to cut fuel cell cost

By T V Jayan
Updated onNovember 19, 2019
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The team, including an IIT Madras scientist, shows zirconium-based substance can replace expensive platinum in fuel cells

The quest for developing cheaper but better fuel cells has just got a boost. A research team, that includes a scientist from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, may have found a cost-effective substitute to platinum catalyst, which is essential for fuel cells to function, but accounts for almost a-fifth of their cost.

In a paper published on Monday in the journal Nature Materials, a team of materials scientists from India, China and the UK claimed that catalysts made of zirconium nitride nanoparticles that they developed could be a superior alternative to platinum catalysts for use in fuel cells and metal-air batteries.

Apart from Tiju Thomas of IIT Madras, Minghui Yang of Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology in Ningbo in China and John Paul Attfield of the University of Edinburgh are the main authors of the study which showed that zirconium nitride nanoparticles can be a highly attractive alternative to platinum. “Platinum is the gold standard as far as fuel cell catalysis is concerned,” said Thomas, an associate professor at the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering at IIT Madras.

If what they discovered in the lab can be translated into real applications, there could be more cost-effective and efficient fuel cells in the market in near future. After all, platinum is a scarcely available metal on earth and costs around ₹2,750 per gram. Zirconium, on the other hand, is abundantly available and is at least 700 times cheaper than platinum. Platinum catalysts are said to account for nearly 20 per cent of the cost of a fuel cell.

“We are willing to work with industry to develop innovative products based on our findings,” Thomas told BusinessLine.

What is a fuel cell ?

Fuel cell is a device that converts chemical energy stored in molecular bonds of chemicals into electrical energy. In more commonly-used hydrogen fuel cells, platinum catalyst is used for splitting hydrogen atoms into positively-charged hydrogen ions and electrons. While electrons flow out to produce direct current electricity, positive hydrogen ions combine with oxygen supplied through another electrode to produce water, paving the way for the production of the one of the cleanest forms of energy.

“In not so distant future, we are to witness a radical reorganisation of the energy landscape -- from one that is based on carbon to that relies on renewables,” said Thomas.

Fuel cells and metal-air batteries play an instrumental role in this transition and they may even become more common-place in one-to-three decades, he said. They may find increasing applications in automotive industry and in off-grid power generation among others. One of the major limiting factors that prevent them from being widespread is the prohibitive cost of platinum.

Low-cost materials that have a high catalytic activity and durability have remained elusive, so industrial use is largely limited to platinum-based catalysts for fuel cells, for example, in automotive applications, the scientists said.

The research team stumbled upon zirconium nitride almost serendipitously. About a decade and a half ago, while working in a Cornell University lab, Thomas and Yang realised the promise that nitrides can offer as catalysts and continued to work on them even after they moved back to their respective countries. Thomas, who has been on a visiting position offered by Chinese Academy of Sciences for last 9 years, has been working closely with Yang’s team. In 2018, for the first time, they quite accidentally discovered that zirconium catalyst’s can actually surpass that of platinum, said Thomas whose lab works on nitride and oxynitride catalysts.

In the present study, the scientists found that zirconium nitride catalysts can not only perform all functions of platinum-based ones, but also surpass many of them. Zirconium nitride catalysts, for instance, have better stability than their platinum counterparts. Platinum catalysts used in fuel cells are seen to degrade over a period of time. Zirconium nitride catalysts, on the other hand, were found to decay at a much slower rate.

Scientists develop cheaper catalysts to cut fuel cell cost
 
Breakthrough by Indian scientists! Invent low-cost technique uses to detect deadly diseases

By: PTI | New Delhi | Published: January 2, 2020 3:31:03 PM

G K Ananthasuresh from IISc-Bangalore, and his former student Sreenath Balakrishanan, who now works at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Goa, developed a method to predict a cell's biochemistry just based on the shape of its nucleus, which hosts the genetic material.
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Such lab tests and chemicals assays, Balakrishnan added, involve the use of costly perishable reagents, which he believes takes the technology away from poor communities.

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru are working on a novel method to diagnose a broad range of diseases, which uses the mechanical properties of cells as compared to commonly used chemical-based lab tests. G K Ananthasuresh from IISc-Bangalore, and his former student Sreenath Balakrishanan, who now works at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Goa, developed a method to predict a cell’s biochemistry just based on the shape of its nucleus, which hosts the genetic material. Their mechanical model, described in the Biophysical Journal, revealed the relationship among three parameters of the nucleus such as its surface area, volume, and projected area or the two-dimensional view of a cell.

According to this model, the shape of the nucleus changes as its enveloping membrane undergoes an increase in tension due to changes in a protein called actin. Using this model, they assessed alterations in the shape of liver cell nucleus caused by the hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. “We have decomposed the individual contributions to nuclear morphology, and used that to predict changes in levels of proteins by merely measuring the alterations in the shape of the nucleus,” Balakrishnan told PTI. The scientists validated their findings by showing that liver cells expressing HCV proteins possessed enhanced cellular stiffness, and reduced stiffness of the nucleus.

They believe that measuring and standardising changes in the mechanical properties of cells can lead to a new approach for disease diagnosis. “Our lab’s key contribution to this field is the identification that we need to employ inverse mechanics to gather more information from mechanical measurements,” Balakrishnan said. “For example, cell stiffness can change due to many factors such as the nucleus, cytoskeleton and cell membrane. By just measuring the changes in cell stiffness can we specifically say which component has changed,” he said.

Conventionally, Balakrishnan said, diagnostic procedures detect the change in the levels of chemicals in tissues and cells that correspond to disease states. “We are working on what can be done with the mechanical response” Ananthasuresh told PTI on the sidelines of an international conference held last month at IIT-Mandi, where he was a keynote speaker. “Because whenever there’s a healthy cell that becomes abnormal in a disease condition, definitely its mechanical response changes because some constitution inside the cell has changed,” he said.

Such lab tests and chemicals assays, Balakrishnan added, involve the use of costly perishable reagents, which he believes takes the technology away from poor communities. Additionally the chemical tests also require sufficient quantities of sample cells, depending on the sensitivity of the tests developed. Balakrishnan said using mechanical properties instead to develop diagnostic procedures can overcome this problem, since these can be measured using the same instrument repetitively for vast quantities of sample.

“For example, if you squeeze a cell, and leave it, allowing it to recover, the time of recovery can be an indicator of the health of the cell,” explained Ananthasuresh, as an example of how physical forces and mechanical properties of cells can become diagnostic principles. To build diagnostic devices which work on these principles, the scientists said the physical properties of cells need to be broken down to contributions from their individual components.

They said this can be done by mechanical modelling of cells and their components, and finding how these are related to each other by physical forces. Both Ananthasuresh and Balakrishanan, however, agreed that the field is very nascent, with very few people across the world working on it. While mechanodiagnostics may not become a clinically viable method to test for all diseases, Balakrishnan said, some conditions affecting the morphology of whole cells like cancer, malaria, and sickle cell anemia may be assessed with the emerging technique.

He said these diseases are known to cause changes in the physical and biomechanical properties of cells, which result in several-fold increases or decreases in cell stiffness, and eventually cause breakdown of the bodily functions. Balakrishnan cited the example of a study by T. R. Kiessling from Leipzig University in Germany who used a device to capture and stretch cells flowing through them to measure their deformability, using which his team assessed suspended breast cancer cells.

Researchers have also developed mechanodiagnostic devices which harness the differences in stiffness of normal red blood cells (RBCs) from infected ones to separate the diseased cells from healthy ones, according to Ananthasuresh, a recipient of the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in 2010. “It took a long time for biologists to believe that the mechanical response does change in abnormal cells and can be an indicator of disease conditions. And now hardly, I can say 10-15 people across the world are working on mechanodiagnostics,” Ananthasuresh said. “But no one disagrees that disease conditions alter the mechanical properties of cells, and that itself is a huge step forward,” he added.

Breakthrough by Indian scientists! Invent low-cost technique uses to detect deadly diseases
 
This IIT-Madras team has a way to kill the hum in gas engines

By TV Jayan
Updated on November 26, 2019
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RI Sujith (second from left), Professor at IIT-M’s Aerospace Department, with students (left to right) Krishna Manoj, Samadhar Pawar and Suraj Dange.

Connecting multiple combustors can help ‘quench’ thermo-acoustic oscillations

Undesirable oscillations experienced in certain type of common gas turbines used by power plants and aircraft engines have always worried their developers.

Globally, the gas turbine industry loses as much as $1 billion annually due to downtime for turbine inspection and replacement of damaged parts due to such thermo-acoustic oscillations.

Some of the early-generation rockets used for satellite launches or space travel exploded in space because of such ruinously large sound oscillations-triggered thermal fluctuations in combustors.

Now, a team of researchers, led by RI Sujith, Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, may have found a way to ‘quench’ such humming.

“Inside a gas turbine using can combustors, the flickering flames produce a continuous sound, which travel as sound waves to the boundary of the container and reflect back to amplify the flames further. This continuous cross-talk between the sound waves and the flames over a period of time becomes unmanageable leading to temporary shutdown of the turbine. This elusive hum has been troubling the gas turbine industry for quite some time,” said Sujith.

Now, the IIT research team, which includes Sujith’s research students, has proposed a unique method to quench this thermo-acoustic oscillations. In a recent paper published in the journal Chaos, the researchers showed that when two combustors exhibiting thermo-acoustic oscillations are coupled through a single connecting tube of appropriate dimensions (that is, length and diameter), the cross-talking of these oscillations leads to the simultaneous quenching of their amplitudes, through a phenomenon known as amplitude death.

The absence of large amplitude oscillations during amplitude death is a desirable operating condition for the combustor, providing an environment for healthy operation, the scientists argued.

“Imagine two suspended bridges side by side. If vehicles are passing on these bridges continuously, the bridges may flutter, leading to a bumpy motion experienced by all passing vehicles. But these bridges can be connected in such a manner that they cancel each other’s oscillation,” said Sujith.

“Although the concept of amplitude death has been known, it has mostly been shown in theoretical studies and also in simple experiments involving oscillators such as metronomes. We are using this concept for the first time in a practical system,” the IIT- Madras Professor told BusinessLine.

Cost-effective solution

The study provides a simple and cost-effective solution for quenching thermoacoustic oscillations developed in multiple combustion systems, where the knowledge for the control of such oscillations remains limited.

Currently, mitigation of thermo-acoustic instability is achieved through active and passive control strategies. Active control involves the alteration of the system condition externally, causing an interruption in the coupling between the acoustic and the heat release rate fluctuations, leading to quenching of thermo-acoustic oscillations. On the other hand, passive controls involve modification of system geometry such that it increases acoustic damping or modifies the instability frequency in the system. Recent studies also focus on developing technologies to alert and thereby avoid the onset of instability.

The insights obtained from the experiments conducted on laboratory systems, known as the horizontal Rijke tubes, by the IIT scientists can be potentially used for the development of several reliable control strategy for practical combustion systems (especially, can or can-annular combustors in a gas turbine engine).

The findings are pertinent and complementary to numerous real-world applications beyond combustion systems, such as a variety of oscillatory instabilities experienced by bridges, skyscrapers, ecological and biological models where they are known to be hazardous.

This IIT-Madras team has a way to kill the hum in gas engines
 
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CSIR & IIT Delhi scientists develop method to manufacture ‘freeform’ optical components

Researchers from CSIR-CSIO & IIT Delhi have developed a method to manufacture optical components, including simple shape optics to freeform optics, by ultra-precision machining process.
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New Delhi: Freeform optics is an emerging field of optics and it has great potential in many fields. A group of researchers from Council for Scientific and Industrial Research-Central Scientific Instruments Organization (CSIR-CSIO) Chandigarh and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi have developed a method that would help in the manufacturing of optical components including simple shape optics to freeform optics by ultra-precision machining process and various related issues.

Currently manufacturing of complicated optical components such as freeform optics is very difficult due to its complicated shape and required high precision. Many other components are imported from other countries due to lack of research in optics fabrication domain in India. Ultra-precision machining is one of the optics fabrication techniques.

“This research work would help in understanding the various issues affecting the performance of ultra-precision machining process. The work is helpful to develop the freeform surface with nanometric surface finish and sub-micron profile accuracies,” said Dr Vinod Mishra, researcher from CSIR-CSIO.

With the help of the developed process, precision moulds can be fabricated which can be utilized for mass production (moulding is the process to develop the large quantities) and to cater the future needs of indigenous development of such optical components.

Where ultra-precision machining process is used to make optical components, the material is removed from the surface in a very controlled manner usually of micrometre scales.

“The material is removed with very sharp diamond cutting tools. Various parameters like vibrations, thermal issues, environmental conditions, machining conditions etc. are affecting the surface quality. We have to minimize the effect of all these factors while we are targeting the nanometric surface quality,” said Mishra.

Freeform optics is a technique that is used in the development of high quality optical systems. Conventional lenses and mirrors have a simple shape that is either concave or convex and they have their limitations too. They cannot produce certain light-beam paths, so lenses and mirrors with a more complex aspherical or freeform surface are needed. These shapes could be a lens shaped like a saddle or a banana.

These are also used in various other fields like medical, Defense, data storage, and aerospace industries. Freeform optics are an advanced version of optical fibres. The basic difference between freeform optics and optical fibres is that optical fibre is a cylindrical shape dielectric waveguide (nonconducting waveguide) that transmits light along its axis by the process of total internal reflection, whereas freeform optics have asymmetrical shapes and they have no translational or rotational symmetry.

Optical fibres are used by many telecommunications companies to transmit telephone signals, Internet communications and cable television signals. The are also used in a multitude of other industries, including medical, Defense, government, for data storage, and industrial or commercial use.

The freeform optics method can also be used to develop smaller, lighter, high-resolution lenses and mirrors. New systems containing these components can be made smaller and lighter, which is a big plus for aerospace instruments, medical instruments and other fields.

CSIR & IIT Delhi scientists develop method to manufacture 'freeform' optical components
 
Gautam said:
This IIT-Madras team has a way to kill the hum in gas engines

By TV Jayan
Updated on November 26, 2019
View attachment 12775
RI Sujith (second from left), Professor at IIT-M’s Aerospace Department, with students (left to right) Krishna Manoj, Samadhar Pawar and Suraj Dange.

Connecting multiple combustors can help ‘quench’ thermo-acoustic oscillations

Undesirable oscillations experienced in certain type of common gas turbines used by power plants and aircraft engines have always worried their developers.

Globally, the gas turbine industry loses as much as $1 billion annually due to downtime for turbine inspection and replacement of damaged parts due to such thermo-acoustic oscillations.

Some of the early-generation rockets used for satellite launches or space travel exploded in space because of such ruinously large sound oscillations-triggered thermal fluctuations in combustors.

Now, a team of researchers, led by RI Sujith, Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, may have found a way to ‘quench’ such humming.

“Inside a gas turbine using can combustors, the flickering flames produce a continuous sound, which travel as sound waves to the boundary of the container and reflect back to amplify the flames further. This continuous cross-talk between the sound waves and the flames over a period of time becomes unmanageable leading to temporary shutdown of the turbine. This elusive hum has been troubling the gas turbine industry for quite some time,” said Sujith.

Now, the IIT research team, which includes Sujith’s research students, has proposed a unique method to quench this thermo-acoustic oscillations. In a recent paper published in the journal Chaos, the researchers showed that when two combustors exhibiting thermo-acoustic oscillations are coupled through a single connecting tube of appropriate dimensions (that is, length and diameter), the cross-talking of these oscillations leads to the simultaneous quenching of their amplitudes, through a phenomenon known as amplitude death.

The absence of large amplitude oscillations during amplitude death is a desirable operating condition for the combustor, providing an environment for healthy operation, the scientists argued.

“Imagine two suspended bridges side by side. If vehicles are passing on these bridges continuously, the bridges may flutter, leading to a bumpy motion experienced by all passing vehicles. But these bridges can be connected in such a manner that they cancel each other’s oscillation,” said Sujith.

“Although the concept of amplitude death has been known, it has mostly been shown in theoretical studies and also in simple experiments involving oscillators such as metronomes. We are using this concept for the first time in a practical system,” the IIT- Madras Professor told BusinessLine.

Cost-effective solution

The study provides a simple and cost-effective solution for quenching thermoacoustic oscillations developed in multiple combustion systems, where the knowledge for the control of such oscillations remains limited.

Currently, mitigation of thermo-acoustic instability is achieved through active and passive control strategies. Active control involves the alteration of the system condition externally, causing an interruption in the coupling between the acoustic and the heat release rate fluctuations, leading to quenching of thermo-acoustic oscillations. On the other hand, passive controls involve modification of system geometry such that it increases acoustic damping or modifies the instability frequency in the system. Recent studies also focus on developing technologies to alert and thereby avoid the onset of instability.

The insights obtained from the experiments conducted on laboratory systems, known as the horizontal Rijke tubes, by the IIT scientists can be potentially used for the development of several reliable control strategy for practical combustion systems (especially, can or can-annular combustors in a gas turbine engine).

The findings are pertinent and complementary to numerous real-world applications beyond combustion systems, such as a variety of oscillatory instabilities experienced by bridges, skyscrapers, ecological and biological models where they are known to be hazardous.

This IIT-Madras team has a way to kill the hum in gas engines
Click to expand...
Any application for this in annular combustor like in kaveri, supposedly suffering from thermo-acoustic combustion instability particularly in the afterburner operation?
 
Gautam said:
IIT Madras Developing New Techniques For Methane Extraction

The research is being funded by IITM and Department of Science and Technology (DST).

By Indo-Asian News Service | Updated: June 18, 2019 16:01 IST
iit-madras_625x300_41417459599.jpg

IIT Madras Developing New Techniques For Methane Extraction

Chennai: The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M) on Tuesday said its researchers are developing new techniques for extracting methane from natural gas hydrates. In a statement issued here, IIT-M said promising results from their research have been published recently in leading international journals such as Energy and Fuels and Applied Energy.

According to IIT-M, there has been worldwide interest in the development of techniques to extract methane gas trapped in ice-like crystalline cages called 'gas hydrates', which are present in shallow sediments along continental coastlines.

"Hydrates are particularly promising methane sources in India because nearly 1,900 trillion cubic meters of methane gas lie untapped in these cages within the waters of the Indian Exclusive Economic Zone," IIT-M said.

According to the institute, this methane is 1,500 times more than the country's current gas reserves. The Ministry of Earth Sciences reports that
Krishna-Godavari and Andaman basins have large amounts of gas hydrates.

The IIT Madras research towards developing techniques to extract methane from gas hydrates can enable indigenous supply of natural gas and potentially lighten the nation's natural gas import burden, the statement said.

The research is being headed by IIT-M Department of Ocean Engineering Professor (Petroleum Engineering) Jitendra Sangwai who studies state-of-the-art processes used to recover crude oil from offshore reservoirs in India. The other members of the research team are Pawan Gupta and Vishnu C.

The research is being funded by IIT-M and Department of Science and Technology (DST).

"Research is underway around the world to develop methods to extract methane from gas hydrates from both clayey and sand-dominated reservoirs. The Krishna-Godavari basin is a clayey reservoir while the off-shore Indian peninsular ones are a mix of both clayey and sandy.

"As gas hydrates are comparatively immobile and impermeable, they need to be dissociated into their constituent gas and water before the methane recovery from hydrate reservoirs is possible," Mr Sangwai was quoted as saying in the statement.

Four techniques are being studied in various laboratories for this dissociation - thermal stimulation, depressurisation, chemical injection and carbon dioxide injection.

Mr Sangwai's team analyses the combined effects thermal stimulation and depressurisation in one branch of study, and polymer injection in another.

In their study on thermal stimulation and depressurization, the IIT-M research team reported that the combination of the two processes is more efficient for methane production from clayey hydrate reservoirs than either soil types, individually.

This has been attributed to the relatively faster increase in volume available for the gas to expand upon application of heat, which results in faster decrease in pressure of the hydrate reservoir.

For the de-pressurisation process alone, the researchers also found that multi-step de-pressurisation is more efficient than the single-step de-pressurisation.

De-pressurisation is the most energy-efficient production approach for extracting gases from clayey hydrates and is possibly the most likely technology to mature in the near future, the statement said.

IIT Madras Developing New Techniques For Methane Extraction
Click to expand...
1,900 trillion cubic meters of methane hydrates are huge... 1 m3 of methane hydrate contain 164 m3 of natural gas....this translates to more than 6 million years worth of natural gas at current consumption level for India at 100% recoverable rate :eek:
 
Nikhil said:
1,900 trillion cubic meters of methane hydrates are huge... 1 m3 of methane hydrate contain 164 m3 of natural gas....this translates to more than 6 million years worth of natural gas at current consumption level for India at 100% recoverable rate :eek:
Click to expand...
And this is just the yet untapped Methane Hydrates. 100% recovery won't be possible, there will be some loss. Even after taking loss in to account we should have enough to rid us of oil imports completely. This of course is assuming foreign funded NGOs don't start playing spoilsport.

Even with out the metal hydrate reserves, we have vast quantities of shale gas. Tripura alone has enough gas to cut our oil import bill by half, assuming there is proper infrastructure to transport the gas also assuming we take in gas as a replacement to oil in the automobile and power industry.

'Tripura could be richest in natural gas'

New discoveries are made all the time :

Natural gas reserves discovered in Tripura

Most recent report puts Tripura's gas output as the highest in the country despite the infrastructure problems :

Tripura is highest natural gas producer in country, says Dharmendra Pradhan
 
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