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Decoding cellular cross-talk

Decoding cellular cross-talk

by | May 28, 2023 | Science


A group of researchers led by Prof Arun K Shukla in the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, have unravelled a previously unknown mechanism that regulates an important class of drug targets known as G protein-coupled receptors.

The discovery has important implications for not only understanding the fundamental mechanism of cellular signalling in our body but also facilitating novel drug discovery.

Cell membranes in our body harbour a special type of protein molecules known as receptors.

These receptors sense different chemicals and hormones and respond accordingly by activating specific physiological responses.

The G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are involved in regulating heart function, blood pressure, mental disorders, and our general behaviour.

Several drugs, such as those used for depression, heart failure, cancer, and hypertension, work by modulating these receptor proteins.

The function of the GPCRs is regulated by another family of proteins known as arrestins, which bind to GPCRs and control their function and physiological responses.

However, a complete understanding of GPCR-arrestin interaction has been mostly elusive so far.

“The researchers have now visualised the cross-talk of GPCRs and arrestins in great detail using the cutting-edge technology cryogenic-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). The same has allowed the team to discover a novel mechanism that is responsible for regulating the function of GPCRs in our body,” says a press release from IIT-Kanpur.

“This study has opened up novel directions for improving the currently existing medicines by lowering their side-effects, and also provides an opportunity for discovering new medicines for several human disease conditions,” says Prof Shukla.

“For example, the chemokine receptor, which is one of the receptors investigated in this study, has important role in breast cancer progression.”





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Device to diagnose, treat stroke at home

Device to diagnose, treat stroke at home

by | May 28, 2023 | Science


Stroke — when blood does not reach the brain — generally means rushing first to a diagnostic centre for a CT scan to detect which type of stroke it is.

If the cause is a clogged artery or vein (ischaemic), the doctor would prescribe a medicine to melt away the block.

If, on the other hand, the cause is a ruptured blood vessel, leading to bleeding (haemorrhagic), the treatment involves creating a clot to plug the leak.

The standard treatment today for a paralytic stroke is physiotherapy, which may, at best, yield partial results.

Prof Shubhajit Roy Chowdhury of the Biomedical Systems Laboratory, School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, IIT-Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, has come up with a portable ‘point of care’ device, resembling a medium-sized suitcase, to detect the type of stroke and treat it.

To detect the type of stroke, a wearable ‘near infra-red spectroscopy’ (NIRS) device emits light of 650-950 nm wavelength, which interacts with blood chromophores after penetrating the tissue.

The reflected light is collected by a photodiode, which can tell whether the stroke is ischaemic or not, since light reflected by a block (clot) is different from that reflected by blood.

Revival pathway

The next problem is determining how to revive brain function. Prof Chowdhury explained to Quantum that while the damaged neurons (brain cells) are gone forever, it is possible to coax the remaining neurons to assume the full functions of the brain. This is done by exposing the brain to a low-density direct current — 0.5-0.6 ampere per sq m against the brain’s tolerance limit of 250 ampere per sq m.

This ‘transcranial direct current stimulation’ (tDCS) has been shown to help revive paralysed parts of the body.

While tDCS is nothing new, the heart of Prof Chowdhury’s invention is a new type of electrode, a button-shaped device with near-invisible hair-like protrusions (spikes).

This special design is crucial. Why? As we know, the brain is full of folds. Through tDCS, current easily reaches the raised folds (gyri) but not the grooves (sulci). Prof Chowdhury’s ‘spiking electrode’ can reach the sulci too.

Bharat Electronics Ltd, the Bengaluru-based government-owned company, seems to be impressed by the device, which, according to Prof Chowdhury, is at a ‘technological readiness level’ of 4.

BEL is in the process of commercialising the device, he told Quantum.





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To deal with carbon dioxide, befriend it

To deal with carbon dioxide, befriend it

by | May 28, 2023 | Science


Countless philosophers have pointed out that you can disarm an adversary by treating him as a friend. Now is the time to apply that principle to mankind’s worst enemy — carbon dioxide.

In theory, this global warming greenhouse gas can also be an industrial product — you can use it in aerated drinks, for example — but industry needs less than one per cent of the carbon dioxide that humans produce.

Can this be increased? Yes, if you can make high-value products out of the gas. As such, researchers have been preoccupied with the valorising of carbon dioxide. Making value-added products means getting carbon dioxide to react with something. But the gas with one carbon atom bonded to two oxygen atoms does not readily react with other materials.

Also read:Leveraging carbon storage

There are two ways to break this bond. The first is to remove one oxygen atom (reduction) to produce carbon monoxide and oxygen; but this requires a lot of energy. To break the bond between carbon and oxygen calls for 805 kilo-joules of energy per molecule.

The other way, non-reduction, is to ‘activate’ the carbon to react with other material. This requires a lot less energy.

We know that a molecule of anything is incredibly small, too small for us to imagine, yet each molecule has its own geography. A carbon dioxide molecule, too, has different ‘sites’, one of which is called ‘lowest unoccupied molecular orbital’. This region loves electrons; if you supply electrons, it will accept them and this, in turn, will ‘activate’ the carbon dioxide molecule. The trick is to find a suitable catalyst that will provide electrons to the carbon dioxide molecule at the desired site.

Researchers working in this area have found out that you can make ‘cyclic carbonates’ with carbon dioxide. Cyclic carbonates — there are eleven of them — are versatile compounds and have wide applications in Li-ion batteries, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and in the manufacture of many fine chemicals. “Depending on the nature of the reaction and catalyst used, different products, such as dimethyl carbonate, heterocycles, formates, formic acid, methanol, alpha- and beta-unsaturated carbonyl compounds, polycarbonates, urea, urethanes, carbon monoxide, etc can be obtained by carbon dioxide conversion,” says a scientific paper produced by researchers led by Prof Venkata Krishnan at the School of Basic Sciences and Advanced Materials Research Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, Himachal Pradesh.

Also read:EU carbon rules to hurt India, others

Prof Krishnan’s team has developed a catalyst, ‘metal-free boron doped graphitic carbon nitride’, for the job. Indeed, that catalyst has been tried earlier — Prof Krishnan acknowledges the pioneering work done by Prof Zhen Zhao of Shenyang Normal University, China — but Krishnan has tweaked the catalyst further for better results by turning it into nanosheets. It is also pertinent to note that there are several ways of activating carbon dioxide, and using a catalyst is one of them.

The catalyst provides electrons to activate carbon dioxide, but to make the high-value products — cyclic carbonates — you need to bend the carbon dioxide molecule, which is a straight line (oxygen-carbon-oxygen), into a triangular ring. At this point, chemicals called ‘epoxides’ enter the scene. An epoxide molecule is triangular with one vertex occupied by an oxygen atom and the other two vertices by carbon atoms, which in turn could be part of any other molecule. So, activated carbon dioxide is made to react with a suitable epoxide. By adding (polymerising) carbon dioxide to a suitable epoxide and manipulating them, you get cyclic carbonates.

This is a promising conversion method, and many types of catalysts have been reported to show good results, says a February 2023 paper by Ting Yan, et al of Shanghai University.

Also read:EU carbon tax: India wants its own energy auditors to do carbon verification of identified exports

Prof Krishnan told Quantum that the pathway to produce cyclic carbonates discovered at IIT-Mandi has several advantages. It requires much less power — about 100 degrees Celsius. It needs no pressure, so does not require additional energy. Importantly, it is solvent-free — solvents can be costly and toxic. Furthermore, you can make the entire range of cyclic carbonates through this pathway.

The most relevant of these products is polycarbonate, a versatile material with a wide range of industrial applications — from automobiles and aerospace to electrical insulation, lens making, medical equipment, packaging, and toys. It can be made with carbon dioxide and epoxides. Who said carbon dioxide is bad?





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EELS: Slithering on Saturn’s icy moon

EELS: Slithering on Saturn’s icy moon

by | May 13, 2023 | Science


On a tiny moon of a distant planet, a billion kilometres from earth, a snake will soon slither through the uncertain terrain. The 13-ft long ‘snake’, weighing 100 kg, will scope its immediate surroundings, figure out how to pass through it, and either crawl through or curve itself sideways or extend itself across chasms without falling in — all the while looking for alien life on the icy moon of Saturn called Enceladus.

Named, tellingly, EELS (for exobiology extant life surveyor), the metal snake is a robot. Made by the US space agency NASA, the engineering marvel will function independent of human assistance. Unlike many other robots, it has no wheels to move on; instead, it moves on 3D-printed, horizontally placed screw threads. With this kind of build, the EELS can go to places where other robots never have.

“Imagine a car driving autonomously, but there are no stop signs, no traffic signals, not even any roads. The robot has to figure out what the road is and try to follow it,” says the project’s autonomy lead, Rohan Thakker. “Then it needs to go down a 100-ft drop and not fall.”

Enceladus is among those places that scientists believe have a better chance of hosting life. The Saturn moon is so far out that any control from the earth is out of the question. Hence the autonomous robot EELS.





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A home-grown probiotic sewage treatment solution

A home-grown probiotic sewage treatment solution

by | May 13, 2023 | Science


Probiotics, the ‘good’ microorganisms with health benefits that are commonly found in fermented foods, are now being deployed in sewage treatment. Chennai-based Esquire Enterprise manufactures a ‘bio-augmented probiotic liquid’ as a locally made “organic and sustainable” alternative to chemical agents such as sodium hypochlorite for sewage treatment.

Launched in December 2020, the company has four plants in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka with capacity to manufacture 390 tonnes of probiotic liquid; it is currently setting up a new 600-tonne plant in Gujarat. Its CEO, Balaaji Sundararaaman, spoke with businessline on the advantages of the product and its potential uses. Edited excerpts:

A regular sewage treatment plant (STP) of 8-10 kilo litres per day (KLD) capacity costs ₹2.5-3 lakh. How economical is the probiotic-based system in comparison?

A regular STP can typically recycle only 60-80 per cent of [sewage] water. But with probiotics, this can be increased to 95 per cent. And the water we supply, which is colourless and odourless, can even go back for use in building maintenance, including toilets. Similarly, when it comes to electricity usage, the blowers in STPs often work for 24 hours a day. With probiotics, you can save six hours of electricity, which is humongous. We are making it economical by increasing the plant’s efficiency by recycling more sewage with fewer resources and in an organic way.

Imported probiotics are priced ₹1,500-2,100 per 500 gram; our product costs just one-third of this.

Moreover, though the chemical supplements are cheaper, our probiotic replacement is better in efficiency and sustainability.

Of the 72,368 million litres of sewage generated per day in India, existing plants treat 31,841 million litres. Will the probiotic system address this gap?

There has been no new technological development in STP. Now, we have the probiotic solution. Probiotic indigenous microbes are available in our country and you’re going to pay less for it, compared to imported supplies, for running an STP. We would like to educate people about the made-in-India product. It can be dispatched to any part of India within four days. So, yes, we will be able to help bridge the gap.

There is no solution, yet, for sludge management in regular STPs. How will the probiotic system address this issue?

This is an augmented liquid. It digests the faecal matter. Basically, these microbes multiply as long as there is faecal matter. And if the system is very efficient, it almost metabolises 97-98 per cent of the sewage. So, there is really no need to dispose of sludge in a river or pond. One litre of our probiotic liquid can handle 10,000 litres of faecal matter. And poured in, the microbes start eating up whatever is available and multiply within seconds.

How is the probiotic system more sustainable than the regular ones?

It uses less water, hence there is cost savings and decrease in carbon footprint. Recycling water within the facility eliminates the need for water tankers and reduces diesel consumption needed for water transportation. Additionally, probiotics help reduce the formation of excess sludge. This, in turn, reduces the need for sludge tankers to transport and disposed of it in environmentally harmful ways, and the associated fuel consumption and carbon footprint. The negative impact of liquid suspended solids (LSS) in terms of odour and toxic emissions, specifically hydrogen sulphide, which can contribute to health issues like asthma, is avoided with organic recycling.

How are you mobilising the raw material for the plant?

Our main ingredients — nearly 60 per cent — comprises cow dung and cow urine. This comes from the 6,000 cows we have across our six centres, of which 90 per cent can’t yield milk. We take care of their food and health needs round the year, collect the cow dung, and ensure it is processed well within time. The processing time for probiotics is 60 days. We’ve already produced close to 500 tonnes of probiotics. This can clean up to 5 billion litres of sewage

.

Published on May 14, 2023





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Powering up India’s supercomputing ambitions

Powering up India’s supercomputing ambitions

by | May 13, 2023 | Science


India is today home to 23 supercomputers — powerful computers that are primarily used for scientific and engineering work that demands ultra high-speed computations.

Although indigenous development of supercomputers began in 1980 — with the involvement of organisations such as BARC, C-DAC and C-DOT, among others — it was the launch of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) in 2015 that accelerated efforts in a big way.

“Compared to five or 10 years ago, India’s supercomputing journey has been quite successful,” says Faisal Ahmad, co-founder and CEO of BIS Research, a market intelligence and advisory firm focusing on deep technology. “Until 2016, India had only four supercomputers.”

The superfast machines are in use in the field of computational chemistry, material science, quantum mechanics, and more, with nearly 5,000 users executing close to 8 lakh jobs on them.

On the flip side, however, use of supercomputers is currently limited to research institutions.

Indian ‘super’ stars

A line-up of supercomputers and the institutions housing them

Param Shivay — IIT-BHU, Varanasi

Param Siddhi-AI — IIT-Hyderabad

Param Pravega — IISc, Bengaluru

Param Utkarsh — C-DAC, Bengaluru

Param Porul — NIT-Trichy

Sahasrat — IISc, Bengaluru

Param Brahma — IISER, Pune

Param Ananta — IIT-Gandhinagar

Param Seva — IIT-Hyderabad

Param Himalaya — IIT-Mandi

Annapurna — IMSc, Chennai

HP Apollo 6500 — IIT-Delhi

Param Ishan — IIT-Guwahati

Param Yuva II — C-DAC, Pune

Param Kamrupa — IIT-Guwahati

Param Yuva — C-DAC, Pune

Param Sanganak — IIT-Kanpur

Param Shakti — IIT-Kharagpur

Param Ganga — IIT-Roorkee

Pratyush — Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune

Param Smriti — National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute, Mohali

Param Yukti — Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru

Mihir — National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, Noida

(Sources: C-DAC website, India Brand Equity Foundation, NSM website, Government of India’s department of science and technology, and IIT websites)

In terms of supercomputing capacity, India has made commendable progress, though it still lags other leading nations.

As of June 2022, China boasted a staggering 173 of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, while the US had 128. From India, only three systems — Param Siddhi AI (ranked 111), Pratyush (132), and Mihir (249) — made it to the list.

“Our focus should be to equip supercomputers with better facilities, rather than achieving a global rank,” says Rupesh Nasre, Faculty, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT-Madras.

Exascale goal

While exascale computing — involving billions of computations per second — is evolving rapidly, India has no exascale supercomputers yet. “We are still looking at petaflops [quadrillion flops, where a ‘flop’ — or floating point operations per second — is a measure of computer performance]. But we should be looking at exaflops now, because the world is already there,” says Nikhil Malhotra, Chief Innovation Officer, Tech Mahindra.

The Indian government has initiated efforts to develop indigenous exascale computing capabilities through NSM by 2024. Does this delay signify an oversight on the part of the country?

Ahmad says, “Param-Shankh, India’s new indigenous exascale supercomputing monster from C-DAC, is set to launch in 2024. Thus, India has not ignored the exascale revolution. Under the NSM scheme, C-DAC is aiming to install 70 supercomputers pan India.”

Beyond research and academia, however, supercomputers have found limited adoption in industry. Lack of awareness is one reason for this. “Both industry and research institutes need to come together to solve this challenge,” says Malhotra.

Hardware capability

India currently lacks the infrastructure to produce the semiconductor devices required for the development of supercomputers.

Moreover, due to friendly trade agreements, companies such as Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and others have access to Indian markets, adds Ahmad.

While the country still relies on imports for some components, indigenisation efforts are on, too.

“We have seen in recent times that India has started building the hardware required for supercomputers, but it is still early days and would need a push,” says Devroop Dhar, co-founder of advisory firm Primus Partners.

As per government data, India’s network of research institutions, in collaboration with industry, is scaling up the technology and manufacturing capability to make more and more parts in India.

In phase I of NSM, 30 per cent of value addition was done in India, and this has been scaled up to 40 per cent in phase II. India has developed an indigenous server, Rudra, which can meet the high-performance computing needs of government bodies and public sector undertakings.

The quantum jump

Supercomputers continue to be highly relevant even in the era of quantum computing. While quantum computers possess immense potential for certain types of calculations, supercomputers excel at tackling a broader range of complex problems.

Malhotra says the link between supercomputers and quantum computers is hierarchical.

“If supercomputers don’t yield the desired effect, I’ll explore the option of quantum computers. It’s a hierarchical scale that I can leverage,” he says.





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