Oligonucleotide-Based Approaches to Inhibit Dengue Virus Replication

Dengue fever is one of the most common viral infections affecting humans. It is an expanding public health problem, particularly in tropical and subtropical regions. No effective vaccine or antiviral therapies against Dengue virus (DENV) infection are available. Therefore, there is a strong need to develop safe and effective therapeutic strategies that can reduce the burden and duration of hospitalizations due to this life-threatening disease. Oligonucleotide-based strategies are considered as an attractive means of inhibiting viral replication since oligonucleotides can be designed to interact with any viral RNA, provided its sequence is known. The resultant targeted destruction of viral RNA interferes with viral replication without inducing any adverse effects on cellular processes. In this review, we elaborate the ribozymes, RNA interference, CRISPR, aptamer and morpholino strategies for the inhibition of DENV replication and discuss the challenges involved in utilizing such approaches.     

Nonlinear Longitudinal Vibrations of Transversally Polarized Piezoceramics: Experiments and Modeling

Nonlinear behavior of piezoceramics at strong electric fields is a well-known phenomenon and is described by various hysteresis curves. On the other hand, nonlinear vibration behavior of piezoceramics at weak electric fields has recently been attracting considerable attention. Ultrasonic motors (USM) utilize the piezoceramics at relatively weak electric fields near the resonance. The consistent efforts to improve the performance of these motors has led to a detailed investigation of their nonlinear behavior. Typical nonlinear dynamic effects can be observed, even if only the stator is experimentally investigated. At weak electric fields, the vibration behavior of piezoceramics is usually described by constitutive relations linearized around an operating point. However, in experiments at weak electric fields with longitudinal vibrations of piezoceramic rods, a typical nonlinear vibration behavior similar to that of the USM-stator is observed at near-resonance frequency excitations. The observed behavior is that of a softening Duffing-oscillator, including jump phenomena and multiple stable amplitude responses at the same excitation frequency and voltage. Other observed phenomena are the decrease of normalized amplitude responses with increasing excitation voltage and the presence of superharmonics in spectra. In this paper, we have attempted to model the nonlinear behavior using higher order (quadratic and cubic) conservative and dissipative terms in the constitutive equations. Hamilton's principle and the Ritz method is used to obtain the equation of motion that is solved using perturbation techniques. Using this solution, nonlinear parameters can be fitted from the experimental data. As an alternative approach, the partial differential equation is directly solved using perturbation techniques. The results of these two different approaches are compared.     

GPU‐accelerated direct numerical simulations of decaying compressible turbulence employing a GKM‐based solver

Gas Kinetic Method‐based flow solvers have become popular in recent years owing to their robustness in simulating high Mach number compressible flows. We evaluate the performance of the newly developed analytical gas kinetic method (AGKM) by Xuan et al. in performing direct numerical simulation of canonical compressible turbulent flow on graphical processing unit (GPU)s. We find that for a range of turbulent Mach numbers, AGKM results shows excellent agreement with high order accurate results obtained with traditional Navier–Stokes solvers in terms of key turbulence statistics. Further, AGKM is found to be more efficient as compared with the traditional gas kinetic method for GPU implementation. We present a brief overview of the optimizations performed on NVIDIA K20 GPU and show that GPU optimizations boost the speedup up‐to 40x as compared with single core CPU computations. Hence, AGKM can be used as an efficient method for performing fast and accurate direct numerical simulations of compressible turbulent flows on simple GPU‐based workstations. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A finite element model for nonlinear behaviour of piezoceramics under weak electric fields

It has been experimentally observed that piezoceramic materials exhibit different types of nonlinearities under different combinations of electric and mechanical fields. When excited near resonance in the presence of weak e to a Duffinor such as jump phenomena and presence of superharmonics in the response spectra. There has not been much work in the litrature to model these types of nonlinearities. Some authors have developed one-dimensional models for the above phenomenon and derived closed-form solutions for the displacement response of piezo-actuators. However, the generalized three-dimensional (3-D) formulation of electric enthalpy, the variational formulation and the FEM implementation have not yet been addressed, which are the focus of this paper. In this work, these nonlinearities have been modelled in a 3-D piezoelectric continuum using higher order quadratic and cubic terms in the generalized electric enthalpy density function. The coupled nonlinear finite element equations have been derived using variational formulation. A special linearization technique for assembling the nonlinear matrices and solution of the resulting nonlinear equations has been developed. The method has been used for simulating the nonlinear frequency response of a lead zirconate titanate plate excited near its first in-plane vibration resonance frequency with sinusoidal excitations of different electric field strengths. The results have been compared with those of the experiment.     

Excitation of surface plasma waves over corrugated slow-wave structure

A microwave propagating along vacuum—dielectric—plasma interface excites surface plasma wave (SPW). A periodic slow-wave structure placed over dielectric slows down the SPW. The phase velocity of slow SPW is sensitive to height, periodicity, number of periods, thickness and the separation between dielectric and slow-wave structure. These slow SPW can couple the microwave energy to the plasma and can sustain the discharge. The efficiency of the power coupling is few per cent and is sensitive to separation between dielectric and slow-wave structure.     

Jordanian Uh,sgl(2) and its Coloured Realization

A two-parametric nonstandard (Jordanian) deformation of the Lie algebra gl(2) is constructed and then, exploited to obtain a new, triangular R-matrix solution of the coloured Yang–Baxter equation. The corresponding coloured quantum group is presented explicitly.     

Intense Upconversion Luminescence of Yb<Superscript>3+</Superscript>-Er<Superscript>3+</Superscript> in Li<Subscript>2</Subscript>O Content Tungsten-tellurite Glasses

The Er³⁺ -Yb³⁺ codoped in Li₂O content tungsten -tellurite (TWL) transparent glasses are synthesized and measured the absorption, Raman and upconversion luminescence (UPL) spectra. At room temperature intense green emission peak at 560 nm ( ⁴S_3/2→⁴I_15/2) and red emission peak at 670 nm ( ⁴F_9/2→⁴I_15/2) of Er³⁺ observed even at minimum 86 mW pumping power of infrared 980 nm excitation. For structure of the TWL glass, Raman spectrum result revealed that an important role of WO₃ in the formation of glass network linkage with Li₂O. Under this influence estimated lifetime of the ⁴I_11/2 of Er³⁺ was 1.89 μs and due to lower phonon energy of the glass produce strong upconversion signal. The effect of Er₂O₃ concentration on emission intensity result indicated that green emission intensity initially increase in compare to red emission. Under the 980 nm pump power variation measured the relatively increases the red emission to the green emission intensity and analyze the possible upconversion mechanism and process.     

Surface plasma waves over bismuth-vacuum interface

A surface plasma wave (SPW) over bismuth-vacuum interface has a signature of mass anisotropy of free electrons. For SPW propagation along the trigonal axis there is no birefringence. The frequency cutoff of SPW lies in the far infrared region and can be accessed using free electron laser. The damping rate of waves at low temperatures is low. The surface plasma wave may be excited by an electron beam of current ∼100 mA propagating parallel to the interface in its close proximity.