Connecting rod is the intermediate link between the piston and the crank. And is responsible to transmit the push and pull from the piston pin to crank pin, thus converting the reciprocating motion of the piston to rotary motion of the crank. Generally connecting rods are manufactured using carbon steel and in recent days aluminium alloys are finding its application in connecting rod. In this w...

Rods and cones are morphologically and developmentally distinct photoreceptor types with different functions in vision. Cones mediate daylight and color vision and in most mammals express M and S opsin photopigments for sensitivity to medium-long and short light wavelengths, respectively. Rods mediate dim light vision and express rhodopsin photopigment. The transcription factor networks that di...

Lampreys represent the most primitive vertebrate class of jawless fish and serve as an evolutionary model of the vertebrate visual system. Transducin-alpha (G alpha(t)) subunits were investigated in lamprey Petromyzon marinus in order to understand the molecular origins of rod and cone photoreceptor G proteins. Two G alpha(t) subunits, G alpha(tL) and G alpha(tS), were identified in the P. mari...

Uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC), which cause urinary tract infections (UTI), utilize type 1 pili, a chaperone usher pathway (CUP) pilus, to cause UTI and colonize the gut. The pilus rod, comprised of repeating FimA subunits, provides a structural scaffold for displaying the tip adhesin, FimH. We solved the 4.2 Å resolution structure of the type 1 pilus rod using cryo-electron microscopy. Residues ...

Charged rod-like polymers are not able to bind all their neutralizing counterions: a fraction of them evaporates, while the others are said to be condensed. We study here counterion condensation and its ramifications, both numerically by means of Monte Carlo simulations employing a previously introduced powerful logarithmic sampling of radial coordinates and analytically, with special emphasis ...

PEGylated polycation/DNA micellar nanoparticles have been developed that can undergo shape transformation upon cleavage of the PEG grafts in response to an environmental cue. As a proof-of-principle, DNA nanoparticles with higher PEG grafting density adopting long, worm- and rod-like morphologies, transition to more condensed nanoparticles with spherical and short-rod morphologies upon cleavage...

Self-assembly behavior of a mixture system containing rod-coil block copolymers and rigid homopolymers was investigated by using Brownian dynamics simulations. The morphologies of formed hierarchical self-assemblies were found to be dependent on the Lennard-Jones (LJ) interaction εRR between rod blocks, lengths of rod and coil blocks in copolymer, and mixture ratio of block copolymers to homopo...

Regulation of rod gene expression has emerged as a potential therapeutic strategy to treat retinal degenerative diseases like retinitis pigmentosa (RP). We previously reported on a small molecule modulator of the rod transcription factor Nr2e3, Photoregulin1 (PR1), that regulates the expression of photoreceptor-specific genes. Although PR1 slows the progression of retinal degeneration in models...

Porous hollow spherical and rod-like silica nanoparticles were obtained via a surfactant templating method adopting hydroxyapatite (HAp) nanoparticles as an etchable core material.

A short review of recent theoretical advances in studies of the interaction between highly charged systems is presented. Such a system could not be described by the mean field theory. More advanced methods have to be used in order to introduce the correlations between highly charged particles. In this work I focus on the system of highly charged surfaces, separated by a solution of molecules wi...