Wind Energy Conversion Based on Matrix Converter

In recent years renewable sources such as solar, wave and wind are used for the generation of electricity. Wind is one of the major renewable sources. The amount of energy from a Wind Energy Conversion System (WECS) depends not only on the wind at the site, but also on the control strategy used for the WECS. In assistance to get the appropriate wind energy from the conversion system, wind turbine generator will be run in variable speed mode. The variable speed capability is achieved through the use of an advanced power electronic converter. Fixed speed wind turbines and induction generators are often used in wind farms. But the limitations of such generators are low efficiency and poor power quality which necessitates the variable speed wind turbine generators such as Doubly Fed Induction Generator (DFIG) and Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator (PMSG). A high-performance configuration can be obtained by using Scherbius drive composed of a DFIG and a converter in combination AC-DC-AC connect between stator & rotor points for providing the required variable speed operation.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijpeds.v5i1.602

Clinical evaluation of siddha drug Saara Parpam in the treatment of Azhal Kalladaippu (Renal Calculi)

The aim of the study is to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of the drug Saara Parpam (internal) in Azhal Kalladaippu. Before initiating the clinical study, approval was got from the Institutional Ethical committee (NIS/6-20/IEC/15-16) for conducting the clinical study. The herbal raw drugs were authenticated by Botanist NIS and the mineral raw drugs were authenticated by Research Officer Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, Siddha Council Research Institute, Arumbakkam, Chennai and the study drug was prepared by the investigator in the Gunapadam laboratory of National Institute of Siddha as per the standard operating procedure mentioned in the protocol. The biochemical (qualitative) analyses were done at the bio chemistry lab of National Institute of Siddha. Physico chemical (quantitative) analysis, phytochemical analysis of the study drug, HPTLC and in vitro lithotriptic activity of Saara Parpam were done at Nobal Research Solutions, Sathiyabama University, and Chennai. For clinical study 80 cases were screened based on inclusion and exclusion criteria at the out patient department of Department of Maruthuvam, National Institute of Siddha. Out of 80 cases 40 cases were recruited for the clinical study. Clinical diagnosis of Azhal Kalladaippu was arrived by both Siddha and modern methodologies. Required laboratory investigations were carried out before and after treatment and the concerned data were recorded in the proforma. Before initiating the study, informed consent was obtained from the patients. A day before starting the study drug treatment, purgation was given (Agathiyar kulambu 130mg with Sankankuppi juice) early morning in empty stomach to the patients correct the elevated mukkutram. The patients were treated for a period of 48 days. The study medicine selected was Saaara parpam at the dose of 260mg twice a day with adjuvant of seerga kudineer after food. Clinical assessment was done during each visit once in 8 days and the data were noted in the prescribed proforma. During the study period there was no event of any adverse reactions owing to the drug wasreported. The biochemical study of the study drug revealed the presence of chloride, Iron, ammonium, etc. The study drug revealed the presence of phytocomponents such as alkaloids, phenols, proteins. In vitro study revealed that, the study drug “Saaraparpam” has liththotriptic action; it acted well on Struvite type of stones. Statistical analysis showed significant difference between before and after treatment in the kidney stone size (p < 0.0001) and symptoms (p < 0.0001) Clinically out of 40 cases, 22 cases (55%) had clinically good improvement (symptoms completely relived) after treated with study drug, 13cases (32.5%) had moderate improvement (symptoms reduced). 5 cases (12.5%) had no improvement. All the 40 cases were taken ultra sonography, before and after the completion of the trial drug treatment. Based on the USG Abdomen reports out of 40 cases 15 cases (37.5%) showed good improvement stone completely dissolved) 16 cases (40%) showed moderate improvement (reduction in number and size) and 9cases (22.5%) cases showed poor prognosis (no change in size and number of stone)

Social and Political Drivers Affecting Wheat Production in Nigeria

Social and political factors are believed to be affecting agricultural operations in a way that stagnates their growth or leads to the total collapse of the system. A study on social and political factors affecting wheat crop production in Nigeria was conducted with the aim of exploring those factors for proper solutions. Primary data was collected through national stakeholders’ focus group discussion while time series data of the country's wheat production, harvested area, and imports was collected. MAXQDA statistical software was used to analyze the focus group discussion report, while compound growth rate analysis was used to compare the growth rate of the variables under study. The results indicated the extent to which political factors affect wheat production in Nigeria more than others. The degree to which external social factors affect the sector was less when compared with political factors and more than internal social factors. Non-adoption of recommended agronomic practices and the knowledge level of the farmers were the major internal social factors. While the major external social factors were consumer food habits, consumer demand for convenience, low produce prices, and high input costs. Political factors identified were social security issues, inconsistent government policies, and intricacies in implementation, the role of the publication media, role playing by the milling industries, international trade interests, and lack of political will. The result also indicated that the total average growth rate of production was negative, and positive growth was recorded in the harvested area, with a high percentage recorded in imports. For Nigeria to achieve the desired outcome, focused commitments and the adoption of a multi-dimensional approach are required

Guiding a language-model based protein design method towards MHC Class-I immune-visibility targets in vaccines and therapeutics

Proteins have an arsenal of medical applications that include disrupting protein interactions, acting as potent vaccines, and replacing genetically deficient proteins. While therapeutics must avoid triggering unwanted immune-responses, vaccines should support a robust immune-reaction targeting a broad range of pathogen variants. Therefore, computational methods modifying proteins’ immunogenicity without disrupting function are needed. While many components of the immune-system can be involved in a reaction, we focus on Cytotoxic T-lymphocytes (CTLs). These target short peptides presented via the MHC Class I (MHC-I) pathway. To explore the limits of modifying the visibility of those peptides to CTLs within the distribution of naturally occurring sequences, we developed a novel machine learning technique, CAPE-XVAE. It combines a language model with reinforcement learning to modify a protein’s immune-visibility. Our results show that CAPE-XVAE effectively modifies the visibility of the HIV Nef protein to CTLs. We contrast CAPE-XVAE to CAPE-Packer, a physics-based method we also developed. Compared to CAPE-Packer, the machine learning approach suggests sequences that draw upon local sequence similarities in the training set. This is beneficial for vaccine development, where the sequence should be representative of the real viral population. Additionally, the language model approach holds promise for preserving both known and unknown functional constraints, which is essential for the immune-modulation of therapeutic proteins. In contrast, CAPE-Packer, emphasizes preserving the protein’s overall fold and can reach greater extremes of immune-visibility, but falls short of capturing the sequence diversity of viral variants available to learn from. Source code: https://github.com/hcgasser/CAPE (Branch: CAPE_1.1

Tuning ProteinMPNN to reduce protein visibility via MHC Class I through direct preference optimization

ProteinMPNN is widely used in protein design workflows due to its ability to identify amino acid sequences that fold into specific 3D protein structures. In our work, we adjust ProteinMPNN to design proteins for a given 3D protein structure with reduced immune-visibility to cytotoxic T lymphocytes that recognize proteins via the MHC-I pathway. To achieve this, we developed a novel framework that integrates direct preference optimization (DPO)—a tuning method originally designed for large language models—with MHC-I peptide presentation predictions. This approach fosters the generation of designs with fewer MHC-I epitopes while preserving the protein’s original structure. Our results demonstrate that DPO effectively reduces MHC-I visibility without compromising the structural integrity of the proteins

Elaborating a coiledâ coilâ assembled octahedral protein cage with additional protein domains

De novo design of protein nanoâ cages has potential applications in medicine, synthetic biology, and materials science. We recently developed a modular, symmetryâ based strategy for protein assembly in which short, coiledâ coil sequences mediate the assembly of a protein building block into a cage. The geometry of the cage is specified by the combination of rotational symmetries associated with the coiledâ coil and protein building block. We have used this approach to design wellâ defined octahedral and tetrahedral cages. Here, we show that the cages can be further elaborated and functionalized by the addition of another protein domain to the free end of the coiledâ coil: in this case by fusing maltoseâ binding protein to an octahedral protein cage to produce a structure with a designed molecular weight of ~1.8 MDa. Importantly, the addition of the maltose binding protein domain dramatically improved the efficiency of assembly, resulting in ~ 60â fold greater yield of purified protein compared to the original cage design. This study shows the potential of using small, coiledâ coil motifs as offâ theâ shelf components to design MDaâ sized protein cages to which additional structural or functional elements can be added in a modular manner.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146469/1/pro3497.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146469/2/pro3497_am.pd

Vaxformer:Antigenicity-controlled transformer for vaccine design against SARS-CoV-2

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has emphasised the importance of developing a universal vaccine that can protect against current and future variants of the virus. The present study proposes a novel conditional protein Language Model architecture, called Vaxformer, which is designed to produce natural-looking antigenicity-controlled SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins. We evaluate the generated protein sequences of the Vaxformer model using DDGun protein stability measure, netMHCpan antigenicity score, and a structure fidelity score with AlphaFold to gauge its viability for vaccine development. Our results show that Vaxformer outperforms the existing state-of-the-art Conditional Variational Autoencoder model to generate antigenicity-controlled SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins. These findings suggest promising opportunities for conditional Transformer models to expand our understanding of vaccine design and their role in mitigating global health challenges. The code used in this study is available at https://github.com/aryopg/vaxformer

A prospective, open label clinical study to evaluate the safety, efficacy and tolerability of azadvir herbal steam inhaler in asymptomatic, mildly symptomatic COVID-19 patients and health care workers posted to covid wards

Background: COVID-19 patients experience cytokine storm which cause pulmonary and extra-pulmonary complications even with currently available of standard of care. Additional antiviral and immune boosters are the need of hour to treat COVID-19 and to prevent post covid complications.Methods: In this study we enrolled 40 asymptomatic to mild COVID-19 patients to receive azadvir herbal steam inhaler along with standard of care. We evaluated the benefits of azadvir herbal steam inhaler by assessing RT-PCR conversion, clinical outcomes and improvement in immune markers (LDH, CRP, D-DIMER).Results: At the end of the study the immune markers improved significantly in study patients. In mild symptomatic cases IL-6 was 23.2 pg/ml on day 0 and 21.8 pg/ml on day 14. Reduction in IL-6 in mild symptomatic patients was statistically highly significant (p=0.0056). Mean IL-6 in asymptomatic patients was 22.3 pg/ml on day 0 and 21.1 pg/ml on day 14. Reduction in IL-6 in asymptomatic patients was statistically highly significant (p=0.0035).  Mean D-dimer was showing decreasing trend from day 0 to day 14 in mild symptomatic patients. In asymptomatic patients D dimer was 0.8 µg/ml on day 0 and 0.6 µg/ml on day 14. D-dimer decreased significantly from day 0 to day 14 (p value =0.0013). Mean LDH values on day 0 in mild symptomatic patients was 319.4 U/l and 219.3 on day 14. The reduction in LDH values in mild symptomatic patients is statistically significant (p value <0.0122). In asymptomatic patients mean LDH values on day 0 was 237 U/l and 194 U/l on day 14. The reduction in LDH values in asymptomatic group was statistically significant. Mean CRP values in mild symptomatic patients on day 0 was 12.2 mg/l and 3.8 mg/l on day 14. There was significant reduction in CRP values in mild symptomatic group which was statistically significant (p value =0.0546). Mean CRP values in asymptomatic patients on day 0 was 4.9 mg/l and 2.8 mg/l on day 14. There was significant reduction in mean CRP in asymptomatic patients which was statistically significant (p value =0.0446). In the present study all 40 patients (100%) cleared the virus and became negative for RT PCR test within 6 days. None of the patients progressed to severe COVID-19 and none of the patients succumbed to the disease.Conclusions: Azadvir accelerated recovery of COVID-19 patients by RT-PCR conversion, early improvement in clinical symptoms and immune markers in this study. This study results clearly indicates that azadvir has antiviral, immune booster activity and has definitive role in the management of asymptomatic to mild COVID-19 patients along with standard of care (CTRI no. CTRI/2020/06/026181)

Robust caregiver-youth discrepancies in irritability ratings on the affective reactivity index: An investigation of its origins

OBJECTIVE: The Affective Reactivity Index (ARI) is widely used to assess young people's irritability symptoms, but youth and caregivers often diverge in their assessments. Such informant discrepancy might be rooted in poor psychometric properties, the differential conceptualization of irritability across informants, or reflect sociodemographic and clinical characteristics. We use an out-of-sample replication approach and leverage longitudinal data, available for a subset of the participants, to test these hypotheses. METHOD: Across two independent samples (NCohort-1 = 765, 8-21 years; NCohort-2 = 1910, 6-21 years), we investigate the reliability and measurement invariance of the ARI, examine sociodemographic and clinical predictors of discrepant reporting and probe the utility of a bifactor model for cross-informant integration. RESULTS: Despite good internal consistency and 6-week-retest-reliability of parent (Cohort-1: α = 0.92, ICC = 0.85; Cohort-2: α = 0.93) and youth forms (Cohort-1: α = 0.88, ICC = 0.78; Cohort-2: α = 0.82), we confirm substantial informant discrepancy in ARI ratings (3 points on a scale from 0 to 12), which is stable over six weeks (ICC = 0.53). Measurement invariance across informants was weak, indicating that parents and youth may interpret ARI items differently. Irritability severity and diagnostic status predicted informant-discrepancy, albeit in opposing directions: higher severity was linked to relative, higher irritability-ratings by youth (Cohort-1: β = -0.06, p < .001; Cohort-2: β = -0.06, p < .001), while diagnoses of Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (Cohort-1: β = 0.44, p < .001; Cohort-2: β = 0.84, p < .001) and Oppositional Defiant Disorder (Cohort-1: β = 0.41, p < .001; Cohort-2: β = 0.42, p < .001) predicted relative higher irritability-ratings by caregivers. In both datasets, a bifactor model parsing informant-specific from shared irritability-related variance fit the data well (CFI = 0.99, RMSEA = 0.05; N2: CFI = 0.99; RMSEA = 0.04). CONCLUSION: Parent and youth ARI reports and their discrepancy are reliable and reflect different interpretations of the scale items; hence they should not be averaged. This finding also suggests that irritability is not a unitary construct. Future work should investigate and model how different aspects of irritability might differ in their impact on the responses of specific informants