Intracellular delivery of mRNA holds great potential for vaccine and therapeutic discovery and development. This is realized by the preeminent role mRNA is playing in the record-breaking pace of SARS-CoV-19 vaccine development. Recent advances in chemical modifications of mRNA have enabled high-efficiency gene expression with superior spatiotemporal control while eliminating...
We propose three sampling-based motion planning algorithms for generating informative mobile robot trajectories. The goal is to find a trajectory that maximizes an information quality metric (e.g. variance reduction, information gain, or mutual information) and also falls within a pre-specified budget constraint (e.g. fuel, energy, or time). Prior algorithms have...
Cystic fibrosis is an inherited genetic disease caused by a single gene mutation in the CFTR protein. Affecting 70,000 people worldwide, this disease is debilitating to patients, resulting in persistent lung infections and decreased quality of life. Due to the various mutation types, there is not currently a single drug...
This paper presents novel data fusion methods
that enable teams of vehicles to perform target search tasks
without guaranteed communication. Techniques are introduced
for merging estimates of a target’s position from vehicles that
regain contact after long periods of time, and a fully distributed
team planning algorithm is proposed that...
Operating autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) near shore is challenging—heavy shipping traffic and other hazards threaten AUV safety at the surface, and strong ocean currents impede navigation when underwater. Predictive models of ocean currents have been shown to improve navigation accuracy, but these forecasts are typically noisy, making it challenging to...
Messenger RNA (mRNA) therapy has massive potential to treat various genetic disorders by providing effective proteins to the diseased cells and tissues. Its therapeutic applications include protein replacement, genome editing, and immunotherapy. For successful mRNA treatment, mRNA must be delivered to the cytosol of target cells. One of the leading...
Nucleic acid therapeutics has cemented itself as one of the most efficacious and robust avenues for treatment of a wide range of diseases from vaccine development to treatment of liver, retina, cancer applications. Non-viral mediated gene delivery using lipid-based nanoparticle (LNP) carriers has proven its compatibility with addressing unexpected, fast...
Dissociation between catabolism and anabolism, generically termed “metabolic uncoupling”, has been studied for aerobic cultures of Shewanella oneidensis MR-1. Under conditions promoting metabolic uncoupling, the cell yield diminishes while the substrate utilization rate remains largely unchanged. The effects of excess substrate conditions and TCS addition on the metabolism of pyruvate...
This research details laboratory assessment of bacterial hydrophobicity, variations in bacterial adhesion properties with growth and extended starvation as well as extension of this assay to colloidal hydrophobicity measurement. Hydrophobicity is an integral component of surface interactions and has been studied extensively for its role in a number of engineering...
EF-hand proteins are a conserved family of proteins that are modulated by divalent cations and regulate diverse cellular activities. In the present study we characterized the molecular determinants of myosin regulatory light chain (RLC) interaction with several subunits of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA)-type glutamate receptor. Myosin RLC is an EF-hand protein...