Influence of the Degree of Deacetylation of Chitosan and BMP-2 Concentration on Biocompatibility and Osteogenic Properties of BMP-2/PLA Granule-Loaded Chitosan/β-Glycerophosphate Hydrogels

Compositions based on chitosan/β-glycerophosphate hydrogels with highly porous polylactide granules can be used to obtain moldable bone graft materials that have osteoinductive and osteoconductive properties. To eliminate the influence of such characteristics as chain length, degree of purification, and molecular weight on a designed material, the one-stock chitosan sample was reacetylated to degrees of deacetylation (DD%) of 19.5, 39, 49, 55, and 56. A study of the chitosan/β-glycerophosphate hydrogel with chitosan of a reduced DD% showed that a low degree of deacetylation increased the MSCs (multipotent stromal cells) viability rate in vitro and reduced the leukocyte infiltration in subcutaneous implantation to Wistar rats in vivo. The addition of 12 wt% polylactide granules resulted in optimal composite mechanical and moldable properties, and increased the modulus of elasticity of the hydrogel-based material by approximately 100 times. Excessive filling of the material with PLA (polylactide) granules (more than 20%) led to material destruction at a ~10% strain. Osteoinductive and osteoconductive properties of the chitosan hydrogel-based material with reacetylated chitosan (39 DD%) and highly porous polylactide granules impregnated with BMP-2 (bone morphogenetic protein-2) have been demonstrated in models of orthotopic and ectopic bone formation. When implanted into a critical-size calvarial defect in rats, the optimal concentration of BMP-2 was 10 μg/mL: bone tissue areas filled the entire material’s thickness. Implantation of the material with 50 μg/mL BMP-2 was accompanied with excessive growth of bone tissue and material displacement beyond the defect. Significant osteoinductive and osteoconductive properties of the material with 10 μg/mL of BMP-2 were also shown in subcutaneous implantation.     

Krylov-Bogolyubov averaging of asymptotically autonomous differential equations

We apply the Krylov and Bogolyubov asymptotic integration procedure to asymptotically autonomous systems. First, we consider linear systems with quasi-periodic coefficient matrix multiplied by a scalar factor vanishing at infinity. Next, we study the asymptotically autonomous Van-der-Pol oscillator.

     

Structure of a poly(2,5‐benzimidazole)/phosphoric acid complex

As‐cast films of poly(2,5‐benzimidazole) exhibit uniplanar orientation in which the planes of the aromatic rings lie parallel to the film surface. Upon doping with phosphoric acid, the original crystalline order is lost, but the doped film can be stretched to produce films with uniaxial orientation. After thermal annealing at 540 °C, nine Bragg reflections are resolved in the fiber diagram, and these are indexed by an orthorhombic unit cell with the dimensions a = 18.1 Å, b = 3.5 Å, and c = 11.4 Å, containing four monomer units of two chains. The absence of odd‐order 00l reflections points to a 2₁ chain conformation, which is probably planar so that the aromatic units can be stacked along the b axis. The water and phosphoric acid contents of the crystalline structure cannot be determined exactly because of the presence of extensive amorphous regions that probably have different solvation. The best agreement between the observed and calculated intensities is for an idealized structure containing two phosphoric acids and two water molecules per unit cell. However, the phosphoric acid is probably present mainly in the form of pyrophosphoric acid and its higher oligomers. In addition, the X‐ray data are consistent with a more disordered structure containing chains with random (up and down) polarity and a lack of c‐axis registry. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 42: 2576–2585, 2004     

Regularization of some linear ill-posed problems with discretized random noisy data

For linear statistical ill-posed problems in Hilbert spaces we introduce an adaptive procedure to recover the unknown solution from indirect discrete and noisy data. This procedure is shown to be order optimal for a large class of problems. Smoothness of the solution is measured in terms of general source conditions. The concept of operator monotone functions turns out to be an important tool for the analysis.

     

Electrophysical properties of nanocomposites based on poly(p-xylylene) and copper nanoparticles

Poly(p-xylylene)-based nanocomposites containing various amounts of copper have been prepared by vacuum codeposition on a cooled substrate. On the basis of the relationship between the electrical conductivity of composites and the volume content of copper, the percolation threshold has been estimated as 10%. This value coincides with the corresponding parameter derived from the concentration dependence of the electrical resistance temperature coefficient. It has been shown that the conductivity of the nanocomposites increases with the moisture content and their moisture sensitivity decreases with an increase in the content of copper from a concentration of 4%. An analysis of the kinetics of the sensor response measured for various moisture contents has shown that the capacity structure of the samples rearranges during adsorption of water. According to the advanced model, the value of the sensor response is determined by a reduction in the height of the potential barrier between nanoparticles and a change in the fractal characteristics of nanocomposites that results from the adsorption of water molecules.     

Numerical differentiation from a viewpoint of regularization theory

In this paper, we discuss the classical ill-posed problem of numerical differentiation, assuming that the smoothness of the function to be differentiated is unknown. Using recent results on adaptive regularization of general ill-posed problems, we propose new rules for the choice of the stepsize in the finite-difference methods, and for the regularization parameter choice in numerical differentiation regularized by the iterated Tikhonov method. These methods are shown to be effective for the differentiation of noisy functions, and the order-optimal convergence results for them are proved.

     

H MAS NMR monitoring of the C-labeled carbon scrambling for propane in zeolite H-ZSM-5

It has been demonstrated that ¹H MAS NMR spectroscopy can be used as a tool for in situ monitoring the reaction kinetics of ¹³C-labeled carbon scrambling in alkane molecules adsorbed on zeolite catalysts at the reaction temperature of 540–570 K. The accuracy of the results and the time resolution are improved compared to ¹³C MAS NMR spectroscopy.     

Computing homotopic shortest paths in the plane

We address the problem of computing homotopic shortest paths in the presence of obstacles in the plane. Problems on homotopy of paths received attention very recently [Cabello et al., in: Proc. 18th Annu. ACM Sympos. Comput. Geom., 2002, pp. 160–169; Efrat et al., in: Proc. 10th Annu. European Sympos. Algorithms, 2002, pp. 411–423]. We present two output-sensitive algorithms, for simple paths and non-simple paths. The algorithm for simple paths improves the previous algorithm [Efrat et al., in: Proc. 10th Annu. European Sympos. Algorithms, 2002, pp. 411–423]. The algorithm for non-simple paths achieves O(log²n) time per output vertex which is an improvement by a factor of O(n/log²n) of the previous algorithm [Hershberger, Snoeyink, Comput. Geom. Theory Appl. 4 (1994) 63–98], where n is the number of obstacles. The running time has an overhead O(n²⁺) for any positive constant . In the case k<n²⁺, where k is the total size of the input and output, we improve the running to O((n+k+(nk)^2/3)log^O(1)n).     

Integrable Structure of Conformal Field Theory II. Q-operator and DDV equation

This paper is a direct continuation of [1] where we began the study of the integrable structures in Conformal Field Theory. We show here how to construct the operators ${\bf Q}_{\pm}(\lambda)$ which act in the highest weight Virasoro module and commute for different values of the parameter λ. These operators appear to be the CFT analogs of the Q - matrix of Baxter [2], in particular they satisfy Baxter's famous T- Q equation. We also show that under natural assumptions about analytic properties of the operators as the functions of λ the Baxter's relation allows one to derive the nonlinear integral equations of Destri-de Vega (DDV) [3] for the eigenvalues of the Q-operators. We then use the DDV equation to obtain the asymptotic expansions of the Q - operators at large λ; it is remarkable that unlike the expansions of the T operators of [1], the asymptotic series for Q(λ) contains the “dual” nonlocal Integrals of Motion along with the local ones. We also discuss an intriguing relation between the vacuum eigenvalues of the Q - operators and the stationary transport properties in the boundary sine-Gordon model. On this basis we propose a number of new exact results about finite voltage charge transport through the point contact in the quantum Hall system. Received: 2 December 1996 / Accepted: 11 March 1997