Three-dimensional blueprinting of molecular patterns in liquid crystalline polymers.

Exploiting the interplay of anisotropic diamagnetic susceptibility of liquid crystalline monomers and site selective photopolymerization enables the fabrication of 3D freeforms with highly refined microstructures. Utilizing chain transfer agents in the mesogenic inks presents a pathway for broadly tuning the mechanical properties of liquid crystalline polymers and their response to stimuli. In particular, the combination of 1,4-benzenedimethanethiol and tetrabromomethane is shown to enable voxelated blueprinting of molecular order, while allowing for a modulation of the crosslink density and the mechanical properties.

Nonuniform structural properties of wings confer sensing advantages.

Sensory feedback is essential to both animals and robotic systems for achieving coordinated, precise movements. Mechanosensory feedback, which provides information about body deformation, depends not only on the properties of sensors but also on the structure in which they are embedded. In insects, wing structure plays a particularly important role in flapping flight: in addition to generating aerodynamic forces, wings provide mechanosensory feedback necessary for guiding flight while undergoing dramatic deformations during each wingbeat.

Morphing pasta and beyond.

Morphing structures are often engineered with stresses introduced into a flat sheet by leveraging structural anisotropy or compositional heterogeneity. Here, we identify a simple and universal diffusion-based mechanism to enable a transient morphing effect in structures with parametric surface grooves, which can be realized with a single material and fabricated using low-cost manufacturing methods (e.g.

Torque-dense photomechanical actuation.

Contactless actuation powered using light is shown to generate torque densities approaching 10 N m kg-1 at angular velocities ∼102 rad s-1: metrics that compare favorably against tethered electromechanical systems. This is possible even though the extinction of actinic light limits the characteristic thickness of photoresponse in polymers to tens of μm. Confinement of molecularly patterned developable shells fabricated from azobenzene-functionalized liquid crystalline polymers encodes torque-dense photoactuation.

Mechanobiology predicts raft formations triggered by ligand-receptor activity across the cell membrane.

Clustering of ligand-binding receptors of different types on thickened isles of the cell membrane, namely lipid rafts, is an experimentally observed phenomenon. Although its influence on cell's response is deeply investigated, the role of the coupling between mechanical processes and multiphysics involving the active receptors and the surrounding lipid membrane during ligand-binding has not yet been understood. Specifically, the focus of this work is on (GPCRs), the widest group of transmembrane proteins in animals, which regulate specific cell processes through chemical signalling pathways involving a synergistic balance between the (cAMP) produced by active GPCRs in the intracellular environment and its efflux, mediated by the (MRPs) transporters.

Computing the Diamagnetic Susceptibility and Diamagnetic Anisotropy of Membrane Proteins from Structural Subunits.

The behavior of large, complex molecules in the presence of magnetic fields is experimentally challenging to measure and computationally intensive to predict. This work proposes a novel, mixed-methods approach for efficiently computing the principal magnetic susceptibilities and diamagnetic anisotropy of membrane proteins. The hierarchical primary (amino acid), secondary (α helical and β sheet), and tertiary (α helix and β barrel) structure of transmembrane proteins enables analysis of a complex molecule using discrete subunits of varying size and resolution.

Magnetically Directed Two-Dimensional Crystallization of OmpF Membrane Proteins in Block Copolymers.

Two-dimensional (2D) alignment and crystallization of membrane proteins (MPs) is increasingly important in characterizing their three-dimensional (3D) structure, in designing pharmacological agents, and in leveraging MPs for biomimetic devices. Large, highly ordered MP 2D crystals in block copolymer (BCP) matrices are challenging to fabricate, but a facile and scalable technique for aligning and crystallizing MPs in thin-film geometries would rapidly translate into applications. This work introduces a novel method to grow larger and potentially better ordered 2D crystals by performing the crystallization process in the presence of a strong magnetic field.

ATM haplotypes and associated mutations in Iranian patients with ataxia-telangiectasia: recurring homozygosity without a founder haplotype.

Ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T) is an autosomal recessive disorder caused by mutations in the ATM gene. The ATM gene spans more than 150 kb at chromosomal region 11q23.1 and encodes a product of 3,056 amino acids.

Nonclassical splicing mutations in the coding and noncoding regions of the ATM Gene: maximum entropy estimates of splice junction strengths.

Ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T) is an autosomal recessive neurological disorder caused by mutations in the ATM gene. Classical splicing mutations (type I) delete entire exons during pre-mRNA splicing. In this report, we describe nine examples of nonclassical splicing mutations in 12 A-T patients and compare cDNA changes to estimates of splice junction strengths based on maximum entropy modeling.