Hydrogels: Biological Properties and Applications

Product Description

The studies on Biohydrogels have had a rapid, exponential evolution in the last decades. Starting from one of the first applications of hydrogels in surgery, polyvinylalcohol crosslinked with formaldehyde under the trade name of Ivalon, we passed through PolyHema hydrogels as contact lens materials, hydrophilic polyurethanes (HPU), biodegradable hydrogels for both reconstructive surgery and pharmaceutical delivery systems, and finally more recently, one decade old, the thermoreversible and transient network hydrogels. Of course all these classes of hydrogels have been always and continuosly studied, improving their performance and field of applications. Recently, most of them have been used as scaffolds for cells, even stem ones, for regenerative applications (tissue engineering). Nevertheless hydrogels are odd materials and many studies still have to be carried out to fully understand their behaviour from mechanical, physicochemical and biological point of view.

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Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems, Volume I: Cellular Biophysics, Regulatory Networks, Development, Biomedicine, and Data Analysis

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This two-volume, interdisciplinary work is a unified presentation of a broad range of state-of-the-art topics in the rapidly growing field of mathematical modeling in the biological sciences. Highlighted throughout both works are mathematical and computational approaches to examine central problems in the life sciences, ranging from the organizational principles of individual cells to the dynamics of large populations.

Volume I covers a number of areas, including:

* Cellular Biophysics

* Regulatory Networks

* Developmental Biology

* Biomedical Applications

* Data Analysis and Model Validation

Volume II examines a diverse range of subjects, including:

* Epidemiology

* Evolution and Ecology

* Immunology

* Neural Systems and the Brain

* Innovative Mathematical Methods and Education

Both volumes will be excellent reference texts for a broad audience of researchers, practitioners, and advanced students in this rapidly growing field at the intersection of applied mathematics, experimental biology and medicine, computational biology, biochemistry, computer science, and physics.

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Royal Holloway University of London, School of Biological Sciences Open Day 27th February 2010


Brief highlights of interviews with Royal Holloway Biosciences graduates, as they talk about the favourite parts of their course and what freshers should expect when coming to Royal Holloway. For more information, please visit the Royal Holloway University School of Biological Sciences website: www.rhul.ac.uk/BioSci Alternatively, visit Royal Holloway University on it’s Science Open Day this Saturday 27th Febuary 2010. Created and Produced by Dale Bancroft and Steven Forrest.

Effect of crotapotin on the biological activity of Asp49 and Lys49 phospholipases A”2 from Bothrops snake venoms

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This digital document is a journal article from Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part C, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Myonecrosis, in addition to edema and other biological manifestations, are conspicuous effects of Bothrops snake venoms, some of them caused by phospholipases A”2 (PLA”2s). Asp49-PLA”2s are catalytically active, whereas Lys49-PLA”2s, although highly toxic, have little or no enzymatic activity upon artificial substrates, due to a substitution of lysine for aspartic acid at position 49. Crotapotin (CA), the acidic counterpart of crotoxin PLA”2 (CB), is a PLA”2-like protein from Crotalus durissus terrificus snake venom, and is considered a chaperone protein for CB, able to increase its lethality about ten fold, but to inhibit the formation of the rat paw edema induced by carrageenin and by snake venoms. In this study, we demonstrate that CA significantly inhibits the edema induced by BthTX-I (23% inhibition), BthTX-II (27%), PrTX-I (25%), PrTX-III (35%) and MjTX-II (10%) on the mouse paw. CK levels evoked by isolated Asp49 or Lys49-PLA”2s were reduced by 40% to 54% in the presence of CA and, in all cases, the membrane damaging activity of the toxins was also reduced. Circular dichroism spectra of the PLA”2s in the presence and absence of CA showed that there was not any detectable secondary structural modification due to association between CA and the myotoxins. However, Fourier Transformed Infrared (FT-IR) analysis indicated that ionic and hydrophobic contacts contributed to stabilize this interaction.

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Application of biological indicators to assess recovery of hydrocarbon impacted soils

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This digital document is a journal article from Soil Biology and Biochemistry, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Remediation programmes are considered complete when human risk-based criteria are met. These targets are unrelated to the ecological parameters that may be important with regard to future soil uses. As a consequence, there has been a move towards the consideration of biological indicators for hazard assessment in conjunction with the remediation of contaminated soils. This study uses a range of biological assays to assess the ecological health of soils from a former gas works site undergoing various remediation treatments. The indicators that optimally differentiated the extent of soil remediation were biomass-C, respiration, dehydrogenase activity, earthworm toxicity and mustard seed germination. Although they had different end-points, once robust and sensitive biological indicators were incorporated into a quantitative soil quality index, they gave a clearer representation of ecological health than chemical data alone by their integration of contamination effects at a number of trophic levels.

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