This 13-week intervention of a vitamin D and leucine-enriched whey protein oral nutritional supplement resulted in improvements in muscle mass and lower-extremity function among sarcopenic older adults. This study shows proof-of-principle that specific nutritional supplementation alone might benefit geriatric patients, especially relevant for those who are unable to exercise. These results warrant further investigations into the role of a specific nutritional supplement as part of a multimodal approach to prevent adverse outcomes among older adults at risk for disability.

We present a methodology to quantify the essential interactions at the interface between inorganic solid nanoparticles (NPs) and biological molecules. Our model is based on pre-calculation of the repetitive contributions to the interaction from molecular segments, which allows us to efficiently scan a multitude of molecules and rank them by their adsorption affinity. The interaction between the biomolecular fragments and the nanomaterial are evaluated using a systematic coarse-graining scheme starting from all-atom molecular dynamics simulations. The NPs are modelled using a two-layer representation, where the outer layer is parameterized at the atomistic level and the core is treated at the continuum level using Lifshitz theory of dispersion forces. We demonstrate that the scheme reproduces the experimentally observed features of the NP protein coronas. To illustrate the use of the methodology, we compute the adsorption energies for human blood plasma proteins on gold NPs of different sizes as well as the preferred orientation of the molecules upon adsorption. The computed energies can be used for predicting the composition of the NP-protein corona for the corresponding material.

We present a multiscale computational approach for the first-principles study of bio-nano interactions. Using titanium dioxide as a case study, we evaluate the affinity of titania nanoparticles to water and biomolecules through atomistic and coarse-grained techniques.