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Times Top News

Non-toxic ionic liquids for silk processing

by | Jul 21, 2024 | Science


Researchers have found an eco-friendly approach that can eliminate the use of toxic chemicals in silk processing.

Traditionally, toxic chemicals like sodium carbonate, sodium hydroxide, sulfuric acid and lithium bromide have been used to extract silk proteins, fibroin and sericin from various types of raw silk fibres, an important step in the process of making silk from cocoons.

A team at the Institute of Advanced Study in Science and Technology (IASST), Guwahati, has identified Ionic Liquids (ILs) which can be sustainable alternatives to the toxic chemicals currently in use for the silk protein extraction process, according to a press release from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. The team, led by Dr Kamatchi Sankaranarayan, has identified four such ILs. Published in Chemistry Select, this research has potential for use in sericin extraction from both mulberry (Bombyx mori) and non-mulberry silks, such as Muga (Antheraea assamensis) and Eri (Philosamia ricini), indigenous to North-east India. Not only does it offer environmentally friendly alternative to traditional chemical methods, it also paves the way for efficient sericin extraction from non-mulberry silks, potentially leading to new applications for these unique fibres.

The researchers explored six different ILs and found some of them were particularly effective in removing sericin without damaging the silk protein structure. The ones showing greatest promise included 1-Butyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride (BMIM.Cl), 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate (EMIM.BF4) and Tetraethylammonium bromide (TEAB). TEAB appeared to be highly effective due to its ability to destabilise sericin proteins.

Tackling battery power fade problem with Omics

Researchers at the Lawrence-Berkeley National Lab, California, US, have discovered a way to tackle the ‘power fade’ problem in batteries. The “power fade problem” in batteries refers to the gradual decrease in the battery’s ability to deliver power over time. The degradation affects the performance and efficiency of batteries, particularly in applications requiring high power output — which is why you have to throw away batteries after about five years. The power fade occurs due to factors such as ageing of electrodes and decomposition of electrolytes.

The L-B scientists took to ‘omics’ to study the power fade problem. The ‘Omics technique’ refers to a suite of technologies used to explore the roles, relationships, and actions of the various types of molecules that make up the cells of an organism.

The scientists “wanted to see if we could use a similar approach to examine the chemical signatures of the battery’s components and identify the reactions contributing to power fade and where they were occurring.”

The researchers focused their analysis on lithium metal batteries with high-voltage, high-density layered oxides containing nickel, manganese and cobalt. Contrary to prior research, which has typically thought the power fade problem was from the battery’s anode, the team observed that power fade stems from the cathode side. This was where particles cracked and corroded over time, hindering charge movement and reducing battery efficiency. “It was a non-obvious outcome,” Youngmin Ko, a postdoc researcher, said in a press release “We found that mixing salts in the electrolyte could suppress the reactivity of typically reactive species, which formed a stabilising, corrosion-resistant coating.”





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Forward into past

by | Jul 21, 2024 | Science


You hail a taxi. A stylish cab called ‘Electrobat’ comes along. It is an electric vehicle.

A distance ahead, the driver stops, begs your forgiveness, for he needs just a jiffy to swap batteries. Three minutes later you are on your way, in a clean, green, electric vehicle — that has just avoided a huge pile of waste, the disposal of which has been a headache for the authorities.

Did I just take you to the future? Not at all. Quite the opposite — I took you to the past, to the year 1897, to New York’s infamous Manhattan, when electric vehicles, which we so covet these days, was the norm. Three years earlier, two engineers named Henry Morris and Pedro Salom, made an electric car and called it Electrobat. Rather than sell the vehicles, they got into running a taxi service. They called it — Electric Wagon & Carriage Company. The venture drove off with a dozen vehicles, but in just two years, was operating a hundred.

The battery it used was the old familiar lead-acid battery. It weighed a thousand pounds (454 kg, or about half as heavy as a Maruti Alto). With that weight, you would think that the vehicle can’t travel fast, but ‘fast’ is a relative term, conveying a different sense in every different context. In the context of 1899, it was an atrociously high speed of 25 km per hour. Guess what was the ‘waste’ that the vehicles avoided? Horse manure.

Electric Wagon & Carriage Co ran successfully until it lost its way due to a fraud, notes an article in National Geographic. In due course, internal combustion engines came and steamrolled the EVs out of business. But now, the EVs are having their sweet revenge.





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De-identifying patients with AI: Ensuring patient privacy while enhancing research

by | Jul 21, 2024 | Science


In India, the most populous country in the world, efficient management — access, storage and retrieval — of healthcare data is increasingly critical. Imagine having access to health records of millions of patients, a treasure trove of information that could dramatically improve public health policies, advance medical research and enhance patient care. However, this also brings a significant challenge: protecting patient’s privacy.

A recent study “Generation and De-Identification of Indian Clinical Discharge Summaries using LLMs” by Sanjeet Singh et al, from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, (IIT Kanpur) and technology company Miimansa dives into this pressing issue.

The researchers explored how artificial intelligence (AI) can be harnessed to de-identify patient records, ensuring that sensitive information remains confidential while still being useful for research and policy-making.

Healthcare data is incredibly valuable. It can reveal patterns about the spread of diseases, the effectiveness of treatments, and the needs of different patient groups. In India, over 330 million patient records have already been linked with unique central IDs. This vast amount of data, roughly equivalent to the population of the US, represents an underutilised resource with the potential to revolutionise public health. However, it also poses a risk. If not handled properly, this data can expose individuals to privacy breaches. The consequences can be severe, from personal embarrassment to identity theft and financial loss.

To mitigate these risks, healthcare data must be de-identified, stripping it of any personal information that could reveal the patient’s identity. Natural Language Processing (NLP), a branch of AI that deals with the interaction between computers and human language, offers powerful tools for de-identification. NLP can scan through text, identify personal health information (PHI), and mask it.

However, there’s a catch: AI systems are only as good as the data they are trained on. Most existing systems have been trained on data from Western countries and they might not perform well on Indian data, given the cultural and linguistic differences.

De-identification of personal health information (PHI) is also critical to ensure compliance with privacy regulations such as the Indian Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, (DPDPA) and similar laws like GDPR in Europe and HIPAA in the US.

The study from IIT Kanpur and Miimansa tackled this challenge head-on. Using a dataset of fully de-identified discharge summaries from an Indian hospital (the Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow), the researchers ran existing de-identification models, including commercial solutions. These models were originally trained on non-Indian datasets which primarily included data from US healthcare institutions. The results were telling: Models trained on non-Indian data did not perform well — a clear indication that AI models need to be trained on region-specific data to be effective.

Synthetic solution

To overcome this limitation, the researchers turned to a clever solution: synthetic data. By using large language models (LLMs) like Gemini, Gemma, Mistral and Llama3, they generated synthetic clinical reports that mimicked real patient data but did not correspond to actual patients, avoiding privacy issues. Training AI models on synthetic data dramatically improved their performance on the real Indian data.

This approach also ensures that healthcare data can be used safely for research and policy-making without risking patient privacy. For India, this could mean more accurate health statistics and better public health interventions.

While the results of this study are promising, there is still a long way to go. AI systems need continuous improvement and validation. The researchers plan to establish an active learning workflow that combines AI models with human expertise. This means that while AI will do the heavy lifting, human experts will refine and validate the results, creating a feedback loop that continuously enhances the system’s accuracy and reliability.

In a country as diverse and populous as India, blend of technology and human touch will be crucial in building a robust, resilient and responsive healthcare system.





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Revolutionising TB research with 3D hydrogel model of lungs

by | Jul 21, 2024 | Science


“It is a very old bug and has evolved with us quite a bit,” says Rachit Agarwal, Associate Professor at the Department of Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Science, referring to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a pathogen that kills 1.3 million every year.

Microbes mutate and develop resistance to existing drugs. When you develop new drugs, you need to test them.

Clinicians culture the bacteria on glass plates or petri dishes, but these do not properly mimic the 3D microenvironment inside lungs. Vishal Gupta, a PhD student explains the situation thus: “In a tissue culture plate, there are no extracellular matrix (ECM) molecules, and even if a very thin layer of ECM is coated on these plates, the lung cells ‘see’ the ECM on one side at best.”

To give those who culture the bacteria an environment closer to reality, researchers from the Department of Bioengineering, IISc, Bengaluru, have designed a 3D hydrogel culture system that “mimics the mammalian lung environment,” says a press release.

Jelly genius

Hydrogel is a material produced by carefully removing the liquids from a jelly, leaving a porous structure that has advantages such as resistance to extreme heat.

The 3D hydrogel developed by IISc scientists is made of collagen, a key molecule present in the ECM of lung cells. Collagen is soluble in water at a slightly acidic pH. As the pH increases, the collagen forms fibrils which cross-link to form a gel-like 3D structure. At the time of gelling, the researchers added human macrophages (immune cells involved in fighting infection) along with the tuberculosis causing pathogen. This entrapped both the macrophages and the bacteria in the collagen allowing researchers to track how the microbe infects the macrophages, the IISc write-up says. Using this set up, the team tracked the progress of an infection over 2-3 weeks. They found that the mammalian cells stayed viable for three weeks. Contrast this with just about a week when they did it by conventional culture methods. Further, the researchers carried out RNS sequencing of the lung cells that grew in hydrogel. They found that the cells were very similar to actual human samples.

The team also tested the effect of pyrazinamide — one of the four most common drugs given to TB patients. They found that even a small amount (10 µg/ml) of the drug was quite effective in clearing out the TB pathogen in the hydrogel culture, says IISc.

Previously, scientists have had to use large doses of the drug — much higher compared to concentrations achieved in patients — to show that it is effective in tissue culture. “Nobody has shown that this drug works in clinically relevant doses in any culture systems… Our setup reinforces the fact that the 3D hydrogel mimics the infection better,” observes Rachit Agarwal.





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Conquering the skies with flying taxis

by | Jul 14, 2024 | Science


It’s a common sight to see small size drones with a carrying capacity of 5 to 10 kg in the sky spraying pesticides, or involved in surveillance of critical infrastructure or delivering drugs in to remote areas. But, the IIT Madras-incubated ePlane is trying to disrupt the sector with its eVTOLs (electric Vertical Take-off and Landing) — an electric drone that can carry both cargo and passengers. The 3X3 m sized muti-copter drone can carry 35 to 50 kg of cargo, travel at 400 ft and up to 50 km.

ePlane, which got a funding of $5-million for the project, is building India’s first and the world’s most compact flying electric taxi with a vision to make flying ubiquitous, says Satyanarayanan R Chakravarthy, Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering, IIT-Madras, and Founder Director of ePlane.

If a car takes an hour to reach a destination, or a helicopter 27 minutes, eVTOL will take just 14 minutes, claims the ePlane team.

eVTOL will serve short haul mobility and urban mobility where there is a traffic congestion problem, says Prof Satyanarayanan, adding that electric aviation will disrupt the aviation sector in the foreseeable future.

From India, for the world

“What is good for India is good for the world. India should do it ahead of others. The country has UPI; the Aadhar stack and EVMs, then why not electric aviation,” he asks.

The five-year-old deep-tech start-up has developed a subscale prototype which it demonstrated last year. It is now working on a commercial version. “We are on the verge of flying that in the next few weeks, and then we will commercialise it. The subscale version is not meant for passenger travel but for cargo. We will tap the logistics players to adopt it. We have to go through a certification process for that as well,” he says.

“We are working on the passenger version, getting into the detailed design phase now. We will get into prototyping later this year. By early next year, we should have the first passenger prototype,” says Prof Satyanarayanan.

The company has built autonomous flight paths for collision avoidance. It will also set up autonomous Air Traffic Control with manual override for safe landing at various locations, he noted.

The subscale prototype will be governed by the drone rules. Although it can go at high altitudes of around 5,000 ft, it can be flown under 400 ft as well. There may not be much hindrance in India as most of the buildings are 50 m to 100 m tall, he explained.

The 50 kg payload could be the mid-mile segment for clients like logistics players and parcel delivering companies. “We are not going to replace all of the cargo movement. We feel that precious cargo, time critical cargo, medical supplies and organs between hospitals are a few examples where we can come in,” he said.

Spreading wings

Drone is a competitive space with different players deploying drones of different sizes and varieties. However, eVTOL flies with wings to cover longer distances. The key is to test the commercial prototype. “We are a few weeks away from its flight test of at least 100 hours. Then we will go through the certification process. We are a few months away from commercialisation,” he added.





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The future of robotics lies in our DNA

by | Jul 8, 2024 | Science


One doesn’t have to study DNA to only study genetics; Scientists are using its programmable nature to create autonomous molecular systems with robotic abilities. In a recent study, “Autonomous assembly and disassembly of gliding molecular robots regulated by a DNA-based molecular controller”, Ibuki Kawamata et al demonstrated how DNA can control molecular-level robots.

This is a significant step toward the future of bio-inspired robotics, with applications in medicine, environmental monitoring and nanotechnology. This research brings us closer to the reality of tiny robots — smaller than a human cell — carrying out complex tasks without human intervention.

Bio-inspired robotics

Living organisms exhibit remarkable autonomy, sensing and responding to their environment without external guidance. Inspired by this efficiency, researchers have been attempting to replicate such behaviour in artificial systems. Enter bio-inspired robotics, blending biology with engineering to create robots from biological molecules. These molecular robots, made from DNA and proteins, are designed to operate at the nanoscale, performing precise tasks within biological environments.

The researchers wanted to develop a system in which molecular robots could self-assemble and disassemble without external prompts. The molecular robots are a combination of a DNA-based molecular controller (specific DNA complexes and enzymes), microtubule (protein) structures and kinesin (protein) motors. These robots were programmed to autonomously form and break apart structures, mimicking natural cellular behaviours.

The molecular controller is designed to generate two different DNA strands that serve as assembly and disassembly signals for the DNA-functionalised microtubules. These DNA signals are designed to trigger specific interactions between the microtubules, leading to their assembly into bundle-like structures or disassembly into individual filaments.

The DNA controller operates through a series of strand displacement and enzymatic reactions. By carefully designing the DNA sequences and reaction cascades, the controller can autonomously perform three basic steps: signal synthesis, release of the linker, and dissociator synthesis.

Seeing is Believing

The researchers analysed the images of the performance by the fluorescent markers of the microtubules using Differential Dynamic Microscopy (DDM). This helped them understand the dynamics of the assembly and disassembly, ensuring that the system functioned as intended.

The DNA controller successfully programmed the microtubules to autonomously assemble into bundle-like structures and then disassemble into individual filaments. This autonomous behaviour was achieved without any external interference, demonstrating the controller’s effectiveness. The system maintained its autonomous function over a significant period, crucial for practical applications, ensuring that the molecular robots can perform their tasks reliably over time.

The Big Picture

The development of autonomous molecular robots is a significant leap forward in synthetic biology and robotics. These tiny machines offer unprecedented precision and control at the molecular level, opening new avenues for scientific and technological advancements.

Molecular robots can revolutionise drug delivery in healthcare and medicine. These tiny machines could be designed to deliver drugs directly to diseased cells, minimising side effects and improving treatment efficacy. By targeting specific cells, such as cancer cells, molecular robots could enhance the precision and effectiveness of treatments. Autonomous molecular robots can detect and respond to environmental pollutants and initiating clean-up processes.





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