Skin, being the protective barrier against the environment, can be subject to frequent trauma and stress, hence has the ability to heal itself rapidly. This capacity is attributed to a large number of resident stem cells and progenitors in the skin, which are activated to proliferate, migrate and differentiate to recreate the cellular diversity and regain tissue integrity. The barrier function of the

Translational motors that depend on cytoskeletal elements, either actin or tubulin, for their activity are critical for cellular function in eukaryotes. Microtubule (MT)-dependent motors are broadly classified as dyneins and kinesins, based on sequence similarity. Typically, dyneins walk towards the minus-ends of MTs, while kinesins walk towards the plus-ends, with some plant and animal kinesins also

Introduction The plasma membrane of a cell undergoes continuous deformations and turning-over of its constituents required for a diverse set of functions. And yet, the membrane retains its steady-state surface tension—without which these functions are adversely affected. Objectives In this review, we discuss how the establishment and maintenance of the homeostatic state of the membrane has a major

Bacterial pore forming toxins (PFTs) are transmembrane proteins produced by pathogenic bacteria that increase infection severity in several instances. PFTs assemble into nano-sized pores on the host plasma membrane, making it permeable to ions and small molecules. As a response to PFTs, the host cell engages in cytoskeleton-mediated repair mechanisms to overcome the damage inflicted to its plasma membrane

The red blood cell (RBC) is unique in terms of its structure and function when compared to other cells in the blood and body. Its anucleated characteristic and biconcave shape (indicative of high surface area to volume ratio) render it deformable. This deformability is useful during circulation when the red blood cell has to traverse capillaries smaller than its size. The cytoskeleton of the red blood

Binary fission of prokaryotic cells depends on a protein called FtsZ that self-assembles into a membrane-associated ring structure (FtsZ-ring) in the early stages of the cell division process. FtsZ is a tubulin homologue, which interacts with many additional proteins contributing to its function forming a ring at the mid-cell, essential for bacterial cell division. Whether the Z-ring is a force-generating

The actomyosin cortex is a thin film, containing actin filaments and myosin molecular motors, located beneath the plasma-membrane of eukaryotic cells. Active processes, driven by ATP hydrolysis, can generate mechanical forces in the cortex. Coordinated force-generation drives large-scale mechanical flows and orientation patterns. These flows can pattern proteins coupled to the cortex leading to the

The cellular cytoskeleton consisting of microtubules, intermediate filaments and the actin filaments is a dynamic structure providing shape and structural stability to cells. Particularly, the actin cytoskeleton formed by a combination of polymerized actin molecules and several other actin binding proteins including myosin is key to sensing and development of mechanical forces in cells. Given this

Centrosome serves as the primary site of microtubule organization in a majority of animal cells. These microtubules carry out several significant functions in the cell such as cell division, chromosome segregation, mechanical support and cellular transport. Proteins localized at the centrosome play extensive role in orchestrating the process of microtubule organization, growth and stabilization in

T lymphocytes (T cells) are the major mediators of adaptive immune response. They detect pathogens primarily via the interaction of their T cell receptor (TCR) with the cognate pathogen-derived peptide displayed in the context of MHC on the infected cell. A critical step in T cell activation is the formation of immunological synapse, a specialized cell–cell conjugate interface between the T cell and

Some of the key questions of interest during the COVID-19 pandemic (and all outbreaks) include: where did the disease start, how is it spreading, who are at risk, and how to control the spread. There are a large number of complex factors driving the spread of pandemics, and, as a result, multiple modeling techniques play an increasingly important role in shaping public policy and decision-making. As

We highlight the usefulness of city-scale agent-based simulators in studying various non-pharmaceutical interventions to manage an evolving pandemic. We ground our studies in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrate the power of the simulator via several exploratory case studies in two metropolises, Bengaluru and Mumbai. Such tools may in time become a common-place item in the tool kit

The COVID-19 pandemic is imposing enormous global challenges in managing the spread of the virus. A key pillar to mitigation is contact tracing, which complements testing and isolation. Digital apps for contact tracing using Bluetooth technology available in smartphones have gained prevalence globally. In this article, we discuss various capabilities of such digital contact tracing, and its implication

The COVID -19 pandemic has seen a rise in the deployment of digital health technologies. This includes those aimed at identifying the infected and making sure they did not spread the infection any further as well as other technologies providing data driven insights aimed at improving the effectiveness of decisions such as locking down certain areas and allowing others to re-open. This paper attempts

Many countries have introduced Lockdowns to contain the COVID19 epidemic. Lockdowns, though an effective policy for containment, imposes a heavy cost on the economy as it enforces extreme social distancing measures on the whole population. The objective of this note is to study alternatives to Lockdown which are either more targeted or allows partial opening of the economy. Cities are often spatially

Abstract The digitization of data including health data (referred to as Internet of Things-IoT in Healthcare) and its usage in delivery of healthcare has been growing rapidly across the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a pivot for exponential growth of IoT in healthcare. Several rapidly evolving technologies are converging to influence the trajectory of IoT in healthcare. There are several challenges

COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented global health crisis in the last 100 years. Its economic, social and health impact continues to grow and is likely to end up as one of the worst global disasters since the 1918 pandemic and the World Wars. Mathematical models have played an important role in the ongoing crisis; they have been used to inform public policies and have been instrumental in

The Internet, which has spanned several networks in a broad range of domains, is having a significant impact on every aspect of our lives. The next generation of networks will utilize a wide variety of resources with significant sensing capabilities. Such networks will extend beyond physically linked computers to include multimodal-information from biological, cognitive, semantic, and social networks

The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 is often used as a proxy for the actual number of ground truth COVID-19-infected cases in both public discourse and policy making. However, the number of confirmed cases depends on the testing policy, and it is important to understand how the number of positive cases obtained using different testing policies reveals the unknown ground truth. We develop an agent-based

Pondering on pandemics and the promise of purification from the plethora of problems that it has spawned, the paper builds on a game-theoretic model of host–pathogen interaction, and... moves beyond. It highlights how quickly this ‘wicked’ problem has led to deceptive Nash equilibria of certain information-asymmetric games as well as their sequels of more complex intertwined games at human scale but

Health Heatmap of India is an open data platform built for bringing together data from diverse sources and facilitating visualization, analysis, and insight building from such data. In this paper, we describe the context and need for such an open data platform and describe the technical aspects of building it. The beta site of the portal is available at https://healthheatmapindia.org.

As SARS-CoV-2 continues to propagate around the world, it is becoming increasingly important to scale up testing. This is necessary both at the individual level, to inform diagnosis, treatment and contract tracing, as well as at the population level to inform policies to control spread of the infection. The gold-standard RT-qPCR test for the virus is relatively expensive and takes time, so combining

Disease surveillance is essential not only for the prior detection of outbreaks, but also for monitoring trends of the disease in the long run. In this paper, we aim to build a tactical model for the surveillance of dengue, in particular. Most existing models for dengue prediction exploit its known relationships between climate and socio-demographic factors with the incidence counts; however, they

India reported its first case of COVID-19 on January 30, 2020. Six months since then, COVID-19 continues to be a growing crisis in India with over 1.6 million reported cases. In this communication, we assess the quality of COVID-19 data reporting done by the state and union territory governments in India between July 12 and July 25, 2020. We compare our findings with those from an earlier assessment

There are more than 8000 documented rare diseases in the world. While each disease is rare in itself, it is estimated that 1 in every 15 or 20 persons is affected by some rare disease. Most rare diseases are caused by just one or two small changes in the genome. Identifying the causative variant from the millions of variants that differentiate one person’s genome from another is a challenging task

India is undergoing an epidemiological transition to non-communicable diseases (NCDs), with NCDs contributing to nearly 60 percent of all deaths in India. NCDs are challenging to manage given their silent onset, low health awareness, significant informational asymmetry, and low health-seeking behavior among the rural population and the poor in India. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW)

Scientists all over the world are moving toward building database systems based on the One Health concept to prevent and manage outbreaks of zoonotic diseases. An appreciation of the process of discovery with incomplete information and a recognition of the role of observations gathered painstakingly by scientists in the field shows that simple databases will not be sufficient to build causal models

The disease caused by SARS-CoV-2—CoVID-19—is a global pandemic that has brought severe changes worldwide. Approximately 80% of the infected patients are largely asymptomatic or have mild symptoms such as fever or cough, while rest of the patients display varying degrees of severity of symptoms, with an average mortality rate of 3–4%. Severe symptoms such as pneumonia and acute respiratory distress

Digital twins are defined as digital replicas of processes, systems or devices developed to foster deeper understanding and prediction. While the concept of digital twins has largely been applied in the manufacturing industry, one could conceive of a digital twin that integrates information from diverse scientific and clinical sources to represent the complex and dynamic relationships within biological

This short paper describes a web resource—the NIST CORD-19 Web Resource—for community explorations of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). The tools for exploration in the web resource make use of the NIST-developed Root- and Rule-based method, which exploits underlying linguistic structures to create terms that represent phrases in a corpus. The method allows for auto-suggesting-related terms

The coronavirus crisis has seen an unprecedented response from India and the world. If the viral outbreak has exposed gross inadequacies in the healthcare systems of nations both rich and poor, it has stirred a digital healthcare revolution that has been building since the past decade. We have seen how this new era of digital health evolved over the years since healthcare started getting increasingly

The Covid-19 pandemic has raised awareness of future biological threats, how we can prepare and develop mitigation strategies. Technology has allowed us to quickly identify the pathogen, map its evolution in real time and develop scores of vaccines within months. This review looks at disease threats from a perspective of human development, and the futuristic technologies that may help in the fight

Bladder carcinoma is the most common malignancy of the urinary system with a high recurrence rate. As of today, bladder carcinoma does not sufficiently benefit from new therapeutic strategies. The molecularly heterogeneous landscape contributes an enormous challenge in the management of this cancer. Consensus clustering based on gene expression data from muscle-invasive and non-muscle-invasive tumors

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are multipotent stem cells that reside in various parts of the body like adipose tissue, bone marrow and umbilical cord with an ability to differentiate into chondrocytes, adipocytes and osteocytes. Rigorous research has helped us understand that MSCs home to wound sites and this homing mechanism has been used in the treatment of many inflammatory diseases. It is now emerging

The ability of cells to assume different phenotypes without changing their genotype is referred to as cellular plasticity. It is increasingly being recognized as a fundamental and essential property of cancer cells, which enables their adaptation to the changing environmental conditions, imposed by both disease progression and therapeutic intervention. Epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a classical

The concept of genetic determinism as illustrated by the metaphors such as ‘genetic blueprint’, or ‘genetic program’ had its beginning immediately after the rediscovery of growth lag observed when bacteria were exposed to a mixture of glucose and galactose or lactose. This concept got reinforced with the discovery of the mechanisms of how lactose activates the transcription of lac operon of E. coli

Cellular plasticity, by large, is the ability through which cells morph into new phenotypic identity by trading-off with the previous one. This phenomenon has been observed in the normal and tumor cells in a very similar fashion. Occurrence of cellular plasticity, in malignancies like epithelial ovarian carcinoma (EOC) are well known but highly debated in terms of origin of the tumor for the inherent

Tumors exhibit genetic and phenotypic diversity leading to intra-tumor heterogeneity (ITH). Further complex ecosystem (stromal and immune cells) of tumors contributes into the ITH. This ITH allows tumors to overcome various selection pressures such as anti-cancer therapies and metastasis at distant organs. Single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) has provided unprecedented insights into ITH and its implications

A cell’s phenotype is determined by its genome sequence and epigenetic state which translate into the biochemical reactions occurring inside the cells. As these biochemical processes are driven by small biological molecules, stochastic fluctuations may arise in the number of these biological molecules inside the cell and in the interactions between these molecules. These fluctuations can cause temporal

One of the most fascinating sights in nature is to witness certain insects, birds, and fish move together in a very coordinated and precise fashion for food search, to avoid predation and for migration. The collective movement is called swarming. In 1885, Gustav Hauser, a German pathologist discovered collective movement in a bacterium he later named Proteus mirabilis (Armbruster and Mobley in, Nat

Quorum sensing, or the ability of a population, to respond to an environmental cue in a coordinated manner has made fundamental changes about how we understand bacterial physiology. In this framework, a population, once it exceeds a certain threshold in size, and in the appropriate environmental conditions, coordinates expression of genes across individual members of the population in a fashion so

Change in the phenotype of a cell is considered as a transition of a cell from one cellular state to another. Cellular state transition can be driven by an external cue or by the noise in molecular processes. Over the years, generalized physical principles, and associated mathematical models have been developed to understand phenotypic state transition. Starting with Waddington’s epigenetic landscape

The term 5G refers to the fifth generation of cellular wireless standards. Following the first four generations which focused on evolving voice and data communications, 5G is expected to greatly expand the range of possible domains to which cellular communications can be applied. The aim of this article is to present an introduction to some guiding principles that provide shape to the physical layer

The traditional role of a communication engineer is to address the technical problem of transporting bits reliably over a noisy channel. With the emergence of 5G, and the availability of a variety of competing and coexisting wireless systems, wireless connectivity is becoming a commodity. This article argues that communication engineers in the post-5G era should extend the scope of their activity in

Future millimeter-wave systems, 5G cellular or WiFi, must rely on highly directional links to overcome severe pathloss in these frequency bands. Establishing such links requires the mutual discovery of the transmitter and the receiver, potentially leading to a large latency and high energy consumption. In this work, we show that both the discovery latency and energy consumption can be significantly

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are a main enabler of the excessive throughput requirements in 5G and future generation wireless networks as they can serve many users simultaneously with high spectral and energy efficiency. To achieve this massive MIMO systems require accurate and timely channel state information (CSI), which is acquired by a training process that involves pilot

In most developing countries across the world, cellular rural users are predominantly pedestrian and indoor users within village homes, and much less from vehicles, let alone fast-moving ones. Specifically, in India, 85% of the villages in the plains are spaced 2–3 km apart uniformly in every direction. The base station required for providing coverage in rural areas is starkly different from the base

Among the several emerging use case families in 5G, high-mobility use case family is a technologically challenging one. It is expected that there will be a growing demand for mobile services in vehicles, high-speed trains, and even aircraft. The degree of mobility support required (i.e., speed) will depend upon the specific use case (e.g., 500 km/h in bullet trains and 1000 km/h in airplanes). Mobility-on-demand

Automation enabled by ultra-reliable and low latency 5G connectivity is expected to transform the industrial landscape over the next decade. Given the spectrum crunch in bands below 6 GHz, there is significant interest in exploring the use of millimeter wave (mmWave) bands for industrial automation. The harsh propagation conditions at high frequencies raise questions about the viability of providing

The upcoming Fifth Generation (5G) mobile network aims to support a wide variety of services. In addition to the four standardized service use cases, network operators are also looking for the ability to deploy newer services in shorter timescales to quickly monetize the 5G network. This has resulted in the emergence of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) as

With the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, their reconfigurability, networking, task automation, and control ability have been a boost to the evolution of traditional industries such as health-care, agriculture, power, education, and transport. However, the quantum of data produced by the IoT devices poses serious challenges on its storage, communication, computation, security, scalability

Two of the most challenging goals for the fifth generation (5G) and beyond communication systems are massive connectivity and higher capacity. The use of traditional orthogonal multiple access techniques limits the number of users that can be served using available resources due to orthogonality constraint. Moreover, the available resources may not be utilized effectively by alloted users thereby resulting

The primary approach to increase coverage and capacity in infrastructure-based wireless networks is densification. Densification, however, presents a major challenge when serving mobile users, which is the overhead associated with the increased rate of base station handovers. Assuming a prior knowledge of a mobile’s trajectory and base stations’ locations, we formulate the problem of determining the

The symbol ϖ appears erroneously in thirteen places in the text of this article. It should be replaced in each case by the symbol π.

Molecular dynamics simulations of benzene and 12 fluorobenzenes with various degrees of fluorine substitution in water reveal that the accumulation of water in the first solvent shell decreases with increase in number of fluorine atoms relative to benzene, with an exception of hexafluorobenzene. Further, the solute–solute radial density function indicates that partially substituted fluorobenzenes sample

This brief review presents an overview and analysis of the experimental studies performed recently in the laboratory of the authors demonstrating the role of hydrogen bonding as a promotional factor for intermolecular vibrational energy relaxation, and as a driving force for the occurrences of specific reaction channels in binary molecular complexes. Both vibrational and electronic spectroscopic methods

Studies on hydrogen bonding interaction in various systems, involving phenylacetylene (PhAc), propargyl alcohol (PA), borazine (BNH), propargyl amine (PAm) were performed using matrix isolation infrared spectroscopy and supported by ab initio computations. Weak intermolecular interactions of the above mentioned precursors with water, methanol, ether, acetylene and benzene were studied. These systems

Mapping of charge densities in molecular crystals has been contemplated ever since it was recognized that X-rays are scattered by the electron density in the crystal. The methodology both from the experimental and theoretical perspective was standardized and applied extensively only during the last few decades, as technological advances were a prerequisite in both data collection and computation. Multipole

Latimer and Rodebush (J Am Chem Soc 42: 1419–1433, 1920) discussed the ways a Lewis dot structure could be drawn for liquid water and proposed that the H held between two octets constitutes a bond in 1920. When it was realized that the other molecule of life, DNA, owes its double helix structure to specific hydrogen bonds between A–T (two) and C–G (three) base pairs, the interest in hydrogen bonding