ii Dedicated to my parents and teachers… iii i. Acknowledgements First of all, thanks to Prof. Sandro Ghisla, for providing me the opportunity to work in his lab. I am lucky indeed to have had such a friendly and lively person as my PhD supervisor. Prof. Peter Macheroux for his constructive criticisms and suggestions during this Ph.D. work and for critical reading of the manuscripts. Prof. Elis...

Separation of polyphenolic phytochemical compounds from their mixtures with sugars is necessary to produce an added-value sugar-reduced extract with high biological activity from fruit juice processing industry waste streams. The separation characteristics of a binary mixture of rutin and glucose using a Pellicon-2 regenerated cellulose ultrafiltration membrane with an area of 0.1 m(2) having n...

BACKGROUND Escherichia coli is one of the most common pathogenic bacteria, which cause urinary tract infections in infants as well as in adult human beings. Due to the emergence of antibiotic resistance in E. coli, there is a great demand of new antimicrobial agent for the treatment of infections caused by such E. coli. This study aims to isolate, identify and characterize the native soil-bacte...

Abstract Background and Aims Medium cut-off membranes (MCO) have been introduced with the claim that larger pores enhance removal of middle-sized uremic toxins. To date, no adequately powered randomized controlled trial has demonstrated this membrane characteristic translates into improved mortality. A well-described consequence pore sizes is a higher dialytic albumin loss [1]. In addition, oth...

Introduction: Oxygen is required as the terminal electron acceptor in mitochondrial respiration, and under conditions of hypoxia there can be paradoxically increased levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS). In turn, high levels of ROS can lead to compensatory production of antioxidants via pathways mediated by the Nrf2 transcription factor and the Antioxidant Response Element (ARE). ARE-driven ...

We required a disposable dialysis chamber of approximately 100 μL internal volume to fit within a small reaction vial. Since our application demanded the highest possible rate of diffusion into and out of the chamber, the surface area-to-volume ratio had to be as high as was practical. Injectable dialysis chambers are commercially available, e.g., the Slide-A-Lyzer® Cassette (Pierce, Rockford,...

Finding new ways to assemble nano-objects into finite superstructures is an important task because their properties depend not only on their size and shape but also on the spatial arrangement and the degree of order among the individual building blocks. Ringlike assemblies are fairly common and have been documented for various polymers, small organic molecules, and spherical inorganic nanoparti...

The printed Biomaterial Laboratory at UTEP does research a printable hydrogel which can have appropriate properties for tissue engineering of the skin. Skin is the largest organ in our body which protects us from the environment and pathogens. Skin can be affected by burns and also by diabetic foot ulcers. The current tissue engineered skin substitutes for treatment of diabetic foot ulcers have...

Fucose-R(1-2)-galactose [FucR(1-2)Gal] sugars have been implicated in the molecular mechanisms that underlie neuronal development, learning, andmemory. However, an understanding of their precise roles has been hampered by a lack of information regarding FucR(1-2)Gal glycoproteins. Here, we report the first proteomic studies of this plasticity-relevant epitope. We identify five classes of putati...