Narrow Results

Bioinformatics techniques to protein secondary structure prediction, such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) and GOR approaches, are mostly single-stage approaches; they predict secondary structures of the protein by taking into account only the information available in amino acid sequences. On the other hand, PHD (Profile network from HeiDelberg) method is a two-stage technique where two Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are cascaded; the second neural network receives the output of the first neural network captures any contextual relationships among the secondary structure elements predicted by the first neural network. In this paper, we argue that it is feasible to extend the current single-stage approaches by adding a second-stage prediction scheme to capture the contextual information among secondary structural elements and thereby improving their accuracies. We demonstrate that two-stage SVMs perform better than present techniques for protein secondary structure prediction.

Despite the constant expansion of the global alginate market and the emergence of a plethora of new brands to meet the rising demand, the literature remains insufficient for the selection and preparation of optimized microcapsules. In this study, the cell transplantation potentials of two commercial alginate brands (Sigma and FMC Biopolymers-PRONATAL) with different M/G ratios were compared in vitro. Different brands of alginates were crosslinked with increasing concentrations of calcium chloride (1.5%, 2%, and 3%w/v). Utilizing size/dimension measurements, compression, swelling, and degradation tests, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and bright field (BF) imaging, the intrastructure of each experimental group was investigated. Moreover, the cell viability of HDF-encapsulated Ca-alginate microcapsules was evaluated. According to SEM and compression analysis, PROTANAL KF200 with a lower M/G ratio was found to be more rigid and robust. Due to the different proportions of MM and GG blocks, Sigma Ca-alginate microcapsules exhibited greater flexibility but lower hardness than PRONATAL KF200 microcapsules. However, there was no significant difference in cell viability between the alginate microcapsules. In future in vivo experiments, encouraging cell transplantation outcomes could be monitored by the choice of PROTANAL KF200 sodium alginate polymer for the microcapsule preparation.

A novel procedure to fabricate nanoarchitectures of crystalline titania hollow shells was developed by using assembled latex particles as templates. Latex particles were assembled on the surface of solid substrates and covered with ultrathin titania films by the surface sol–gel process. When the titania-covered latex particle was subjected to oxygen plasma treatment, hollow titania spheres were formed at the original site of particle deposition. Following calcination of the amorphous, titania hollow shells induced their crystallization to titania nanocrystals (anatase).

A novel procedure to fabricate nanoarchitectures of crystalline titania hollow shells was developed by using assembled latex particles as templates. Latex particles were assembled on the surface of solid substrates and covered with ultrathin titania films by the surface sol–gel process. When the titania-covered latex particle was subjected to oxygen plasma treatment, hollow titania spheres were formed at the original site of particle deposition. Following calcination of the amorphous, titania hollow shells induced their crystallization to titania nanocrystals (anatase).