The assembly of nanoparticles to form unique nanostructured materials is one of the most exciting areas due to their applications in various fields. There is a need to develop environment friendly routes to synthesize such nanomaterials with good control over the assembly of nanoparticles. In the current study, various template based methods have been developed to synthesize nanostructured materials using biologically safe approaches. In this context, natural and unmodified rhamnolipids were thermally self-assembled to form soft microtubules, which could act as a template to produce metal nanoparticles onto themselves due to the presence of rhamnose moieties at their surfaces. The porous gold/silver microwires like structures with fairly controlled nanofeatures were produced after calcination of rhamnolipids-nanoparticles composite fibers at high temperature. Moreover, rhamnolipids were used as reducing as well as stabilizing agent for the synthesis of highly stable gold and silver nanoparticles of fairly uniform size. In addition to the rhamnolipids, fungal hyphae were also used as living template to direct the organization of biocompatible gold nanoparticles, to form the fungal hyphae-gold nanoparticles composite materials. The calcination of these composites at high temperature led to the formation of porous gold microwire-like structures. The gold nanoparticles, used as building blocks, for this purpose were synthesized using tea extract as reducing and stabilizing agent. Such type of porous metal microwires might have potential applications in catalysis, sensors and Surface-enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS). Template assisted highly porous metals (platinum, iron oxide) and hydroxyapatite were also prepared using polymer beads as sacrificial scaffolds. Two types of polymer templates, synthetic (polyacrylamide) and natural (calcium alginate), were used to direct the organization of metal and hydroxyapatite nanoparticles to produce organic- inorganic hybrid materials. Heat treatment of such composite materials at high temperature led to the formation of porous metals, metal oxide and hydroxyapatite materials. Moreover, the fungal biomass was incorporated inside the polymeric matrix of these beads to demonstrate the in situ synthesis of metal, especially gold and silver, nanoparticles. This provides a very simple and a straightforward strategy for the Abstract preparation of metal-polymer composite materials and ultimately porous metals after calcination. Different types of nanoparticles synthesized during present study were also evaluated to examine their role in affecting the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) efficiency. For that matter, an optimized PCR system, used for typing of Salmonella strains, was used to assess the effect of nanoparticles addition. In this study, three different types of nanoparticles were used such as citrate stabilized gold nanoparticles, rhamnolipids stabilized gold and silver nanoparticles and magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles. The elimination of non-specific amplification was somehow reduced while using gold and silver nanoparticles in appropriate concentration, but there was not much improvement in PCR efficiency in terms of yield. The surface chemistry of nanoparticles was found important for their effect on PCR. For example, citrate stabilized gold nanoparticles enhanced the PCR efficiency to some degree but rhamnolipid stabilized gold nanoparticles did not change the level of amplification of same target DNA. The magnetic nanoparticles, however, were found to inhibit the PCR under similar experimental conditions.
The key objective of this paper is to find the relationship between the liberal narratives in Pakistan on relationship with India and its effects on universities students’ perception of terrorism. There is a consensus among some prominent scholars that right wing political parties, security establishment and big media houses are producing a kind of national security narrative based on the troika; India as security threat to Pakistan, Islam as rallying cry for national cohesion, and support from great powers to finance ambitious security dominated foreign policy about the neighboring countries that does not help in counter-terrorism at home. This paper has adopted quantitative research method. It is a descriptive study and data was collected from four major public sector universities through survey questionnaires. The liberal narrative on India is weaker in Punjab on all issues. The findings of liberal narratives on India reject the claims of existing literature that there is a positive relationship between liberal narrative about India in Pakistan and counter-terrorism measures in FATA. Three variables researched in case study of Afghanistan reject the existing literature that there is a positive relationship between liberal narrative and counter-terrorism measures.
In Pakistan, the perception among teachers of English is that teaching of English is an easy task, requiring no specific academic/professional background in English subject. In this backdrop, this research attempts to investigate the identity of teachers of English in Pakistan, using primarily narrative inquiry methods. The term identity' is elusive because of multiplicity of meanings. The literature reveals that identity is affected by many psychological, social, and cultural factors and identity of teachers of English can be best studied where they exhibit their identities in practice, i.e. school and classrooms. In this way, data were collected at two stages; through conducting workshops of 20 teachers by using a qualitative questionnaire to understand their professional identities and reasons for joining teaching as profession and through narrative inequiry conducted with two research participants, each from government and private school, for understanding their professional, social, and pedagogical identities. The data analysis reveals that most of the teachers of English in both public and private schools are not professionally trained as teachers of English. However, the teachers of private schools are comparatively better trained from professional, social and pedagogical perspectives: some of them have appropriate academic/professional background; they possess better collegiality, collaboration and social interactions among themselves; and they are free to use innovative teaching methods in classrooms. All teachers of government schools have BEd degrees but not in their relevant subject. Similarly, their pedagogical practices are limited because of lack of resources and inappropriate as well as intrusive inspection procedures. The findings of the study reveal that appropriate professional qualification, interpersonal relations including collegiality and collaboration and student-centered pedagogy are major factors contributing to professional, social, and pedagogical identities of teachers of English in Pakistan, respectively. This research recommends a similar research at broader level taking into consideration additional categorizations of schools and variables that determine identity of teachers of English in Pakistan.