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Although the concept of immunonutrition as a subject area and its use (Calder & Kew, 2002) is a relatively recent one, Hippocrates recognized a linkage between nutrition and good health in the following: "If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment, and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health." Many have documented the specific connection between nutrition host resistance and immunity (Field, 2000; Field, Johnson, & Schley, 2002). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the crucial role of protein motions in the function of biological macromolecules requires methods for their characterization. These motions lead to noticeable alterations in the decay of nuclear spin magnetization. Recent advances in solution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) make quantitative connections between µs-ms motions and nuclear spin relaxation in proteins. The techniques serve as useful probes of motional kinetics and thermodynamics and their relation to function. Here, we review the two most common experimental methods for characterizing conformational motions in proteins: the relaxation-compensated Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (rcCPMG) and off-resonance experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses various issues related to the design methods for nonlinear control systems. In a proportional integral differential (PID) controller the control signal is built up as a weighted sum of three terms: a proportional term--proportional to the error between the actual and desired value of the to-be-controlled plant's output--drives the plant's output to the reference; an integral term compensates for the steady-state error caused by uncertainties in the plant's model; and a differential term--proportional to the time derivative of the plant's output--speeds up the convergence towards the desired reference. The PID controller has had and still has many applications in technical systems. More recent methods in nonlinear control theory that should be mentioned are feedback linearization, passivity-based control, and Lyapunov control.