This paper proposes an underactuated grippers mechanism that grasps and pulls in different types of objects. These two movements are generated by only a single actuator while two independent actuators are used in conventional grippers. To demonstrate this principle, we have developed two kinds of gripper by different driving systems one is driven by a DC motor with planetary gear reducers and another is driven by pneumatic actuators with branch tubes as a differential. Each pulling-in mechanism in the former one and the latter one is achieved by a belt-driven finger surface and a linear slider with an air cylinder, respectively. The motor-driven gripper with planetary gear reducers can pull-up the object after grasping. However, the object tends to fall when placing because it opens the finger before pushing out the object during the reversed movement. In addition, the closing speed and the picking-up speed of the fingers are slow due to the high reduction gear. To solve these drawbacks, a new pneumatic gripper by combining three valves, a speed control valve, a relief valve, and non-return valves, is proposed. The proposed pneumatic gripper is superior in the sense that it can perform pulling-up after grasping the object and opening the fingers after pushing-out the object. In the present paper, a design methodology of the different underactuated grippers that can not only grasp but also pull up objects is discussed. Then, to examine the performance of the grippers, experiments were conducted using various objects with different rigidity, shapes, size, and mass, which may be potentially available in real applications.The current pandemic has highlighted the need for rapid construction of structures to treat patients and ensure manufacturing of health care products such as vaccines. In order to achieve this, rapid transportation of construction materials from staging area to deposition is needed. In the future, this could be achieved through automated construction sites that make use of robots. Toward this, in this paper a cable driven parallel manipulator (CDPM) is designed and built to balance a highly unstable load, a ball plate system. The system consists of eight cables attached to the end effector plate that can be extended or retracted to actuate movement of the plate. The hardware for the system was designed and built utilizing modern manufacturing processes. A camera system was designed using image recognition to identify the ball pose on the plate. The hardware was used to inform the development of a control system consisting of a reinforcement-learning trained neural network controller that outputs the desired platform response. A nested PID controller for each motor attached to each cable was used to realize the desired response. For the neural network controller, three different model structures were compared to assess the impact of varying model complexity. It was seen that less complex structures resulted in a slower response that was less flexible and more complex structures output a high frequency oscillation of the actuation signal resulting in an unresponsive system. It was concluded that the system showed promise for future development with the potential to improve on the state of the art.Knowledge of the host response to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 remains limited, hindering the understanding of COVID-19 pathogenesis and the development of therapeutic strategies. During the course of a viral infection, host cells release exosomes and other extracellular vesicles carrying viral and host components that can modulate the immune response. The present study used a shotgun proteomic approach to map the host circulating exosomes’ response to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Cysteine Protease inhibitor We investigated how SARS-CoV-2 infection modulates exosome content, exosomes’ involvement in disease progression, and the potential use of plasma exosomes as biomarkers of disease severity. A proteomic analysis of patient-derived exosomes identified several molecules involved in the immune response, inflammation, and activation of the coagulation and complement pathways, which are the main mechanisms of COVID-19-associated tissue damage and multiple organ dysfunctions. In addition, several potential biomarkers-such as fibrinogen, fibronectin, complement C1r subcomponent and serum amyloid P-component-were shown to have a diagnostic feature presenting an area under the curve (AUC) of almost 1. Proteins correlating with disease severity were also detected. Moreover, for the first time, we identified the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the exosomal cargo, which suggests that the virus might use the endocytosis route to spread infection. Our findings indicate circulating exosomes’ significant contribution to several processes-such as inflammation, coagulation, and immunomodulation-during SARS-CoV-2 infection. The study’s data are available via ProteomeXchange with the identifier PXD021144.Post-transcriptional regulation is an important step in the control of bacterial gene expression in response to environmental and cellular signals. Pseudomonas putida KT2440 harbors three known members of the CsrA/RsmA family of post-transcriptional regulators RsmA, RsmE and RsmI. We have carried out a global analysis to identify RNA sequences bound in vivo by each of these proteins. Affinity purification and sequencing of RNA molecules associated with Rsm proteins were used to discover direct binding targets, corresponding to 437 unique RNA molecules, 75 of them being common to the three proteins. Relevant targets include genes encoding proteins involved in signal transduction and regulation, metabolism, transport and secretion, stress responses, and the turnover of the intracellular second messenger c-di-GMP. To our knowledge, this is the first combined global analysis in a bacterium harboring three Rsm homologs. It offers a broad overview of the network of processes subjected to this type of regulation and opens the way to define what are the sequence and structure determinants that define common or differential recognition of specific RNA molecules by these proteins.Coarse-grained (CG) molecular dynamics (MD) simulations allow us to access much larger length and time scales than atomistic MD simulations, providing an attractive alternative to the conventional simulations. Based on the well-known MARTINI CG force field, the recently developed Gō-MARTINI model for proteins describes large-amplitude structural dynamics, which has not been possible with the commonly used elastic network model. Using the Gō-MARTINI model, we conduct MD simulations of the F-BAR Pacsin1 protein on lipid membrane. We observe that structural changes of the non-globular protein are largely dependent on the definition of the native contacts in the Gō model. To address this issue, we introduced a simple cutoff scheme and tuned the cutoff distance of the native contacts and the interaction strength of the Lennard-Jones potentials in the Gō-MARTINI model. With the optimized Gō-MARTINI model, we show that it reproduces structural fluctuations of the Pacsin1 dimer from atomistic simulations. We also show that two Pacsin1 dimers properly assemble through lateral interaction on the lipid membrane.