INDIAN INSTITUTE of Technology (IIT-K) director Dr Sanjay G Dhande stressed on the need to strengthen the inter-disciplinary research programmes at the institute as well as other research centres to get encouraging results.
Inaugurating a three-day international seminar on ‘Common trends in traffic systems: physical and computational models in transportation engineering and biological sciences’ here on Wednesday, he said this kind of deliberations required close affinity with other departments of science like mathematics, biology, physics and mechanical disciplines to reach at any definite conclusions.
He said it was a new thrust area in engineering sciences and needed serious deliberations for the benefit of human beings in times to come.
Dr Dhande said the institute had most of the requisite systems and facilities for taking up research in any new field by scientists singly or jointly. He assured the participating scientists that every effort would be made to provide adequate resources and facilities for promoting research programmes at the institute.
Delivering the keynote address, R Lipowsky of MPI, Potsdam, Germany said that every biological cell contained a huge number of different nanomachines which helped human and animal bodies to perform various functions.
{{/usCountry}}Delivering the keynote address, R Lipowsky of MPI, Potsdam, Germany said that every biological cell contained a huge number of different nanomachines which helped human and animal bodies to perform various functions.
{{/usCountry}}He said the present challenge before scientists today was to understand the real mechanism of motor molecules as to why did they often jam during transportation and did their jamming cause any disease or the jamming was an indication of future physical ailment. RB Stinchcombe of Oxford University deliberated on the ‘Basic theory: primitive cooperative particle flow models’ and discussed recent additions to this theory. GV Shivshankar of NCBS, Bangalore, M Barma of TIFR, Mumbai, N Tuteja and R Tuteja also presented their research papers on the occasion.
Almost all scientists invariably stressed on the need to know how do biological and nanomotors were formed, what were the things they transported, what were the factors or molecules involved in regulating this transport, what were the basic elements that made the track for the cell-motor traffic organisation and the kind of proteins or other substances they transported to various parts of the body.
Scientists said the knowledge of all these factors was necessary to make a breakthrough in medical science. They said the complete knowledge of human motor cells could help understand the reasons of various fatal diseases affecting human beings. Besides, results of this new research could also help to know the causes behind various neurological disorders in the body, said research scholar Manish Jaiswal.