Using Raman Spectroscopy to Investigate the Molecular Level Characteristics of Endometriosis

Endometriosis is a benign gynecologic disorder. It is particularly common among young women and may make pregnancy difficult. In this study molecular level characterization of endometriosis tissues were performed using Raman spectroscopy in combination with multivariate statistical analysis. Three hundred sixty six Raman spectra recorded from different points of seventy two tissue samples, taken from the cyst walls of twelve patients were examined. Principle component analysis (PCA) followed by linear discriminant analysis (LDA) were performed on the Raman data, and the samples were then classified into three groups: severe, moderate, and weak endometriosis. In the severe endometriosis group, the relative band intensities of DNA were increased. Moreover, increase in pyrrole moieties and kynurenine were seen. The results show that endometriosis severity correlates to increase in DNA concentration, and degradation of tryptophan due to increased indoleamine-pyrrole 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO) activity, and an increase in kynurenine concentration and pyrrole intermediate. It is concluded that Raman spectroscopy is capable of providing a quick diagnosis, ahead of the pathology result being reported

Case Study of High-Throughput Drug Screening and Remote Data Collection for SARS-CoV-2 Main Protease by Using Serial Femtosecond X-ray Crystallography

Since early 2020, COVID-19 has grown to affect the lives of billions globally. A worldwide investigation has been ongoing for characterizing the virus and also for finding an effective drug and developing vaccines. As time has been of the essence, a crucial part of this research has been drug repurposing; therefore, confirmation of in silico drug screening studies have been carried out for this purpose. Here we demonstrated the possibility of screening a variety of drugs efficiently by leveraging a high data collection rate of 120 images/second with the new low-noise, high dynamic range ePix10k2M Pixel Array Detector installed at the Macromolecular Femtosecond Crystallography (MFX) instrument at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). The X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) is used for remote high-throughput data collection for drug repurposing of the main protease (Mpro) of SARS-CoV-2 at ambient temperature with mitigated X-ray radiation damage. We obtained multiple structures soaked with nine drug candidate molecules in two crystal forms. Although our drug binding attempts failed, we successfully established a high-throughput Serial Femtosecond X-ray crystallographic (SFX) data collection protocol