Magnetically Propelled Fish-Like Nanoswimmers.

The swimming locomotion of fish involves a complex interplay between a deformable body and induced flow in the surrounding fluid. While innovative robotic devices, inspired by physicomechanical designs evolved in fish, have been created for underwater propulsion of large swimmers, scaling such powerful locomotion into micro-/nanoscale propulsion remains challenging. Here, a magnetically propelled fish-like artificial nanoswimmer is demonstrated that emulates the body and caudal fin propulsion swimming mechanism displayed by fish. To mimic the deformable fish body for periodic shape changes, template-electrosynthesized multisegment nanowire swimmers are used to construct the artificial nanofishes (diameter 200 nm; length 4.8 µm). The resulting nanofish consists a gold segment as the head, two nickel segments as the body, and one gold segment as the caudal fin, with three flexible porous silver hinges linking each segment. Under an oscillating magnetic field, the propulsive nickel elements bend the body and caudal fin periodically to generate travelling-wave motions with speeds exceeding 30 µm s-1 . The propulsion dynamics is studied theoretically using the immersed boundary method. Such body-deformable nanofishes exhibit a high swimming efficiency and can serve as promising biomimetic nanorobotic devices for nanoscale biomedical applications.

A patent review of histone deacetylase 8 (HDAC8) inhibitors (2013-present).

INTRODUCTION: The processes and course of several fatal illnesses, such as cancer, inflammatory diseases, and neurological disorders are closely correlated with HDAC8. Therefore, novel HDAC8 inhibitors represent effective therapeutic possibilities that may help treat these conditions. To yet, there are not any such particular HDAC8 inhibitors available for sale. This review was conducted to examine recent HDAC8 inhibitors that have been patented over the last 10 years. AREAS COVERED: This review focuses on HDAC8 inhibitor-related patents and their therapeutic applications that have been published within the last 10 years and are accessible through the Patentscope and Google Patents databases. EXPERT OPINION: A handful of HDAC8 inhibitor-related patents have been submitted over the previous 10 years, more selective, and specific HDAC8 inhibitors that are intended to treat a variety of medical diseases. This could lead to the development of novel treatment approaches that target HDAC8. Employing theoretical frameworks and experimental procedures can reveal the creation of new HDAC8 inhibitors with enhanced pharmacokinetic characteristics. A thorough understanding of the role that HDAC8 inhibitors play in cancer, including the mechanisms behind HDAC8 in other disorders is necessary.

A Fish-like Binocular Vision System for Underwater Perception of Robotic Fish.

Biological fish exhibit a remarkably broad-spectrum visual perception capability. Inspired by the eye arrangement of biological fish, we design a fish-like binocular vision system, thereby endowing underwater bionic robots with an exceptionally broad visual perception capacity. Firstly, based on the design principles of binocular visual field overlap and tangency to streamlined shapes, a fish-like vision system is developed for underwater robots, enabling wide-field underwater perception without a waterproof cover. Secondly, addressing the significant distortion and parallax of the vision system, a visual field stitching algorithm is proposed to merge the binocular fields of view and obtain a complete perception image. Thirdly, an orientation alignment method is proposed that draws scales for yaw and pitch angles in the stitched images to provide a reference for the orientation of objects of interest within the field of view. Finally, underwater experiments evaluate the perception capabilities of the fish-like vision system, confirming the effectiveness of the visual field stitching algorithm and the orientation alignment method. The results show that the constructed vision system, when used underwater, achieves a horizontal field of view of 306.56°. The conducted work advances the visual perception capabilities of underwater robots and presents a novel approach to and insight for fish-inspired visual systems.

Nonlinear electromechanical modeling and robustness of soft robotic fish-like energy harvester: insights and possible issues.

This work investigates the possible integration of an energy harvester in a bioinspired fish-like aquatic unmanned vehicle. The defined fish-like system utilizes a reduced complexity prescribed motion as the representation for energy harvester to be subjected to. Nonlinear electromechanical modeling is performed by considering the geometric and piezoelectric nonlinearities. A convergence analysis is carried out in order to determine the required modes in the Galerkin discretization due to the presence of nonlinear interactions between the prescribed and relative motions. The utilization of higher-order modeling for the strain and material leads to the identification of impactful prescribed motions terms that can activate the nonlinearities in the system, results in more harmonics to consider, and leads to the presence parametric excitation terms. Considering a reduced-complex model by decreasing the value of the quadratic constraint envelope that the fish-like system would be forced with, the soft-robotic system behaves more with a base excitation characteristic. Small damping would allow this prescribed motion with reduced quadratic envelope forcing still induces a hardening behavior, but the other harmonics and parametric resonance seen are greatly reduced. Considering this reduced complexity system, the interaction between the prescribed and base excitations is also investigated to demonstrate that when the two excitations are of similar nature constructive and destructive build of the response waveform can occur when looking at near the first natural resonance. It is shown that the quenching phenomenon can take place which may result in a destructive response of the piezoelectric energy harvester. The results show that the robustness of the fish-like robot is directly dependent on the design parameters including the damping of the structure, importance of the undulatory motion, and activation of the resonances.

Genetic variants of flavin-containing monooxygenase 3 (FMO3) derived from Japanese subjects with the trimethylaminuria phenotype and whole-genome sequence data from a large Japanese database.

Flavin-containing monooxygenase 3 (FMO3) is a polymorphic xenobiotic- and dietary compound-metabolizing enzyme associated with the genetic disorder trimethylaminuria. We phenotyped 428 Japanese subjects using traditional urinary phenotyping assays and identified two subjects with <20% FMO3 metabolic capacity. Both subjects had novel frameshift mutations. Proband 1 harbored a novel CC deletion resulting in p.[(Pro153Gln fs; Phe166Ter)] FMO3, which was in trans configuration with p.(Cys197Ter). Proband 2 harbored a novel T deletion resulting in p.[(Met211Arg fs; Val220Ter)] FMO3, which was in trans configuration with p.[(Val257Met; Met260Val)]. We also analyzed a new large Japanese database for novel single nucleotide substitutions of FMO3 and identified the following variants with very low frequencies (<∼0.1%): p.(Lys56Glu), p.(Ser112Asn), p.(Asn164Lys), p.(Gly191Cys), p.(Ile199Ser), p.(Pro248Thr), p.(Pro248Leu), p.(Asp286Tyr), and p.(Ala311Pro). Recombinant FMO3 proteins of the above and unanalyzed variants underwent kinetic analysis of their trimethylamine/benzydamine N-oxygenation activities. Gly191Cys, Ile199Ser, Asp286Tyr, and Ala311Pro variant FMO3 proteins exhibited severely decreased activities (Vmax/Km <5% of wild-type). Although these new variants were rare alleles in Japanese self-reported trimethylaminuria sufferers and in the large genomic database, we found that most Japanese individuals compound heterozygous or homozygous for any of these missense FMO3 variants or known severe mutations [e.g., p.(Cys197Ter)] had impaired FMO3-dependent N-oxygenation of malodorous trimethylamine.