Muhammad Suhail Rizwan

VacSol: a high throughput in silico pipeline to predict potential therapeutic targets in prokaryotic pathogens using subtractive reverse vaccinology

BackgroundWith advances in reverse vaccinology approaches, a progressive improvement has been observed in the prediction of putative vaccine candidates. Reverse vaccinology has changed the way of discovery and provides a mean to propose target identification in reduced time and labour. In this regard, high throughput genomic sequencing technologies and supporting bioinformatics tools have greatly facilitated the prompt analysis of pathogens, where various predicted candidates have been found effective against certain infections and diseases. A pipeline, VacSol, is designed here based on a similar approach to predict putative vaccine candidates both rapidly and efficiently.ResultsVacSol, a new pipeline introduced here, is a highly scalable, multi-mode, and configurable software designed to automate the high throughput in silico vaccine candidate prediction process for the identification of putative vaccine candidates against the proteome of bacterial pathogens. Vaccine candidates are screened using integrated, well-known and robust algorithms/tools for proteome analysis, and the results from the VacSol software are presented in five different formats by taking proteome sequence as input in FASTA file format. The utility of VacSol is tested and compared with published data and using the Helicobacter pylori 26695 reference strain as a benchmark.ConclusionVacSol rapidly and efficiently screens the whole bacterial pathogen proteome to identify a few predicted putative vaccine candidate proteins. This pipeline has the potential to save computational costs and time by efficiently reducing false positive candidate hits. VacSol results do not depend on any universal set of rules and may vary based on the provided input. It is freely available to download from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vacsol/.

Design and manufacturing of a low-cost 2-DOF autonomous sentry gun

In this paper, design and development of a self-sufficient sentry robotic gun is presented. Professional robotic assemblies which are generally developed for security purposes are targeted toward high efficiency and are based on extensive control algorithms. This makes them quite expensive and infeasible for low budget applications. One important component of such systems is that of motion detection. Motion detection also plays a key role in security applications installed at banks, offices and vulnerable areas. An efficient motion detection system has been developed using embedded micro-controller and MATLAB interface. The proposed system can also be set into an autonomous mode of operation, in which the system tracks and engages targets without any human intervention. Aside from autonomous mode, there is also a manual over-ride mode. The hardware employed in the proposed system is based on easily accessible materials. Motion detection and image processing was implemented using MATLAB image processing toolbox and periodic background estimation subtraction was used for the detection of motion.

Impact of Short Selling on Volatility of Individual Stocks and Aggregate Market: Empirical Evidence from China.

This paper explored the linkage between short selling and market stabilization. While financial and economic theory advocates the positive role played by short sellers for market stabilization, short sellers are frequently blamed for causing market decline and increasing the panic in falling markets. Chinas regulators allowed short selling in 2010 and this reform provided us an interesting data set to check whether short sellers destabilize the market or play a positive role. By using asymmetric TGARCH model on daily return data of Shanghai Stock Exchange 50 index from January 5, 2007 to June 11, 2012, and taking into account Day-of-the-Week effect, financial crisis and regional and international spillovers, we found robust evidence that short sale trading reduces the volatility and stabilizes the market. Our findings have implications for Chinas regulators in policy making as well investors in the Chinese stock market in portfolio development.