scholarly journals From mammoths to materials: synthetic biology moves into the biomaterial space

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-23
Author(s):  
Michael R. Behrens ◽  
Warren C. Ruder
Keyword(s):  
Synthetic Biology ◽  
Recombinant Dna ◽  
Biological Systems ◽  
Biological Properties ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Environmental Cues ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
The Future ◽  
New Research ◽  
Societal Problems

Synthetic biology is a relatively new research field that employs synthetic recombinant DNA technologies to engineer capabilities for addressing a wide variety of scientific and societal problems. We highlight a few noteworthy projects and achievements spanning the field of synthetic biology. In particular, some of the ways synthetic biological tools have been used to create novel biomaterials. Biological systems, like cells or larger organisms, can be made not only to synthesize new biomaterials but also to act as biomaterial constituents themselves, imbuing the materials with useful biological properties like the ability to respond dynamically to environmental cues. Looking into the future, there are many promising research directions synthetic biologists can take to develop tomorrow's biomaterials.

Negotiations and the Future of Alliance Studies

2019 ◽  
pp. 169-180
Author(s):  
Paul Poast
Keyword(s):  
Explanatory Variable ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
The Core ◽  
Outside Options ◽  
Treaty Negotiations ◽  
The Future ◽  
New Research ◽  
Defense Cooperation

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's main claims and empirical findings, discussing the implications of these findings as well as directions for future research. At their heart, alliance treaties are about using military force. As such, war planning can be conceptualized as the core of alliance treaty negotiations. Equipped with this premise, the book argued that the key variable determining whether conditions are conducive to agreement is the compatibility of the participants' ideal war plans. These plans must be both operationally and strategically compatible. When war plan compatibility is low, the second key explanatory variable comes into play: the number of negotiation participants that have attractive outside options. The chapter then highlights how the arguments and evidence in the book indicate new research directions in four areas related to alliances: alliance treaty design, alliance reliability, NATO expansion, and the formation of defense cooperation agreements.

scholarly journals New Advances in General Biomedical Applications of PAMAM Dendrimers

Molecules ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (11) ◽  
pp. 2849 ◽  
Author(s):  
Renan Araújo ◽  
Soraya Santos ◽  
Elizabeth Igne Ferreira ◽  
Jeanine Giarolla
Keyword(s):  
Biomedical Applications ◽  
Biological Properties ◽  
Pamam Dendrimers ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Neglected Diseases ◽  
New Class ◽  
Specific Organ ◽  
Selective Delivery ◽  
New Research ◽  
Advanced Applications

Dendrimers are nanoscopic compounds, which are monodispersed, and they are generally considered as homogeneous. PAMAM (polyamidoamine) was introduced in 1985, by Donald A. Tomalia, as a new class of polymers, named ‘starburst polymers’. This important contribution of Professor Tomalia opened a new research field involving nanotechnological approaches. From then on, many groups have been using PAMAM for diverse applications in many areas, including biomedical applications. The possibility of either linking drugs and bioactive compounds, or entrapping them into the dendrimer frame can improve many relevant biological properties, such as bioavailability, solubility, and selectivity. Directing groups to reach selective delivery in a specific organ is one of the advanced applications of PAMAM. In this review, structural and safety aspects of PAMAM and its derivatives are discussed, and some relevant applications are briefly presented. Emphasis has been given to gene delivery and targeting drugs, as advanced delivery systems using PAMAM and an incentive for its use on neglected diseases are briefly mentioned.

scholarly journals Recent Advances in the Synthesis of Glycoconjugates for Vaccine Development

Molecules ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (7) ◽  
pp. 1712 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cinzia Colombo ◽  
Olimpia Pitirollo ◽  
Luigi Lay
Keyword(s):  
Vaccine Development ◽  
Fungal Infections ◽  
Thick Layer ◽  
Biological Properties ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Host Cells ◽  
Recent Advances ◽  
Initial Adhesion ◽  
Immunogenic Proteins ◽  
New Research

During the last decade there has been a growing interest in glycoimmunology, a relatively new research field dealing with the specific interactions of carbohydrates with the immune system. Pathogens’ cell surfaces are covered by a thick layer of oligo- and polysaccharides that are crucial virulence factors, as they mediate receptors binding on host cells for initial adhesion and organism invasion. Since in most cases these saccharide structures are uniquely exposed on the pathogen surface, they represent attractive targets for vaccine design. Polysaccharides isolated from cell walls of microorganisms and chemically conjugated to immunogenic proteins have been used as antigens for vaccine development for a range of infectious diseases. However, several challenges are associated with carbohydrate antigens purified from natural sources, such as their difficult characterization and heterogeneous composition. Consequently, glycoconjugates with chemically well-defined structures, that are able to confer highly reproducible biological properties and a better safety profile, are at the forefront of vaccine development. Following on from our previous review on the subject, in the present account we specifically focus on the most recent advances in the synthesis and preliminary immunological evaluation of next generation glycoconjugate vaccines designed to target bacterial and fungal infections that have been reported in the literature since 2011.

scholarly journals Sustainability in Heritage Wood Conservation: Challenges and Directions for Future Research

Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Zarah Walsh-Korb
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development Goals ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Heritage Conservation ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Future ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
Sustainable Conservation ◽  
New Research

Conserving the world’s cultural and natural heritage is considered a key contributor to achieving the targets set out in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, yet how much attention do we pay to the methods we use to conserve and protect this heritage? With a specific focus on wooden objects of cultural heritage, this review discusses the current state-of-the-art in heritage conservation in terms of sustainability, sustainable alternatives to currently used consolidants, and new research directions that could lead to more sustainable consolidants in the future. Within each stage a thorough discussion of the synthesis mechanisms and/or extraction protocols, particularly for bio-based resources is provided, evaluating resource usage and environmental impact. This is intended to give the reader a better understanding of the overall sustainability of each different approach and better evaluate consolidant choices for a more sustainable approach. The challenges facing the development of sustainable consolidants and recent research that is likely to lead to highly sustainable new consolidant strategies in the future are also discussed. This review aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion of sustainable conservation and highlight the role that consolidants play in truly sustainable heritage conservation.

Topic structure and evolution patterns of documentary heritage preservation and conservation research in China

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaolin Zhou ◽  
Yun Bai ◽  
Yue Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Record ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Cooperative Research ◽  
Heritage Preservation ◽  
China National Knowledge Infrastructure ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Core ◽  
New Research ◽  
Topic Structure

PurposeThis study aims to identify the prominent topics, the distribution and association characteristics of topics and the topic evolutionary trends of Documentary Heritage Preservation and Conservation (DHPAC) research in China.Design/methodology/approachKeywords of relevant papers in China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) were extracted as the data source in this study. First, frequency and co-occurrence of keywords of the selected papers were obtained by using SATI. Second, co-word network indicators were calculated with the Pajek software. Then, VOSviewer was applied to optimize the visualization of the sub-communities. Finally, a topics evolution map of this research field was implemented by CorTexT.FindingsThe research topics of DHPAC research in China were unbalanced but distinct. Topics of DHPAC research in China possessed inconspicuous orientation and consistency. The core topics had less influence on the overall network. A research system had formed with archival conservation and ancient books conservation as the core research directions. Research in this field had formed four continuous evolutionary paths about ancient books conservation, salvage conservation, archival conservation and archives conservation technology science with topics fusion and differentiation coexisting. Attentions on “ancient books conservation”, “paper relics conservation”, “electronic record”, “digitization”, “minority”, “documents in the republic of China” had increased during the past two decades and new hot topics of DHPAC research kept appearing in China.Originality/valueThis study synthesized and analyzed the research results of DHPAC research in China from a more comprehensive perspective and revealed the topic structure and longitudinal evolution process intuitively with co-word analysis and social network analysis, which can assist researchers to improve research systematization, discover new research directions and seek cooperative research path.

Scientometric analysis of the term 'microbiota' in research publications (1999–2017): a second youth of a century-old concept

2019 ◽  
Vol 366 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesya Baudoin ◽  
David Sapinho ◽  
Abdelghani Maddi ◽  
Luis Miotti
Keyword(s):  
Research Field ◽  
Scientometric Analysis ◽  
Research Front ◽  
Research Focus ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Publication Patterns ◽  
Subject Categories ◽  
Great Progress ◽  
Important Health ◽  
New Research

ABSTRACTGreat progress in microbiota research during last decades resulted in a growing corpus of publications mentioning the term ‘microbiota’. Specifically, the human microbiota increasingly recognised nowadays as one of the most important health challenges is becoming an emerging research front. By examining over 28 000 microbiota-related papers from the Web of Science database, our study aims to characterise the evolution of publication patterns in this field between 1999 and 2017. The corpus is first analysed in terms of breakdown by journal subject categories, then an additional insight in the structuring of the microbiota research into different topics is provided by means of topic modelling. Our results demonstrate that over time (i) a substantial increase in the publications number is accompanied by a broad diversification of associated journal subject categories; (ii) the research focus moved outside from its primary research field showing successive shifts from dentistry and ecologically centred areas, through agri-food applied topics, towards the most recent clinical applications. The trends in thematic structure of the field presented from a historical perspective suggest that the current systemic approach to host–microbiota relationship inherited from the ecological background of the concept of microbiota has opened up a number of new research directions and perspectives.

Research on the Application of Co-Evolutionary Algorithms in Automated Negotiation

2012 ◽  
Vol 532-533 ◽  
pp. 1522-1526
Author(s):  
Qiang Xu ◽  
Yong Yuan ◽  
Feng Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Algorithms ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Automated Negotiation ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
The Future ◽  
Basic Ideas ◽  
Future Work

Automated negotiation based on co-evolutionary algorithms is an emerging research field in recent years. This paper introduced the basic ideas of evolutionary and co-evolutionary algorithms, and discussed the main theories and approaches in the research of automated negotiation based on co-evolutionary algorithms. The five key elements in simulation of negotiation experiments are also presented in detail. Finally, the future work and research directions are pointed out.

scholarly journals Conditional Text Generation for Harmonious Human-Machine Interaction

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-50
Author(s):  
Bin Guo ◽  
Hao Wang ◽  
Yasan Ding ◽  
Wei Wu ◽  
Shaoyang Hao ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Research Field ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Text Generation ◽  
Human Machine Interaction ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Concept Model ◽  
New Research ◽  
Key Techniques ◽  
Machine Interaction ◽  
Generation Technology

In recent years, with the development of deep learning, text-generation technology has undergone great changes and provided many kinds of services for human beings, such as restaurant reservation and daily communication. The automatically generated text is becoming more and more fluent so researchers begin to consider more anthropomorphic text-generation technology, that is, the conditional text generation, including emotional text generation, personalized text generation, and so on. Conditional Text Generation (CTG) has thus become a research hotspot. As a promising research field, we find that much attention has been paid to exploring it. Therefore, we aim to give a comprehensive review of the new research trends of CTG. We first summarize several key techniques and illustrate the technical evolution route in the field of neural text generation, based on the concept model of CTG. We further make an investigation of existing CTG fields and propose several general learning models for CTG. Finally, we discuss the open issues and promising research directions of CTG.

scholarly journals Synthetic Biology – Towards an Engineering Science

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (S1) ◽  
pp. S102-S112
Author(s):  
Marc-denis Weitze ◽  
Alfred Pühler
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Synthetic Biology ◽  
Molecular Biology ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Engineering Science ◽  
Engineering Sciences ◽  
New Research ◽  
Science Of The Artificial

The new research field of synthetic biology is emerging from molecular biology, chemistry, biotechnology, information technology and engineering. This paper describes synthetic biology as a ‘Science of the Artificial’ and identifies structural features of engineering sciences that can be applied to this new kind of biology as opposed to traditional biology. The search for laws already in traditional biology has been difficult. In Synthetic Biology, action and application stand in the foreground and laws increasingly lose ground as a meaningful concept.

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