Beyond Fermi pseudopotential: a modified GP equation

We present an effective potential and the corresponding modified Gross-Pitaevskii equation that account for the energy dependence of the two-body scattering amplitude through an effective-range expansion. For the ground state energy of a trapped condensate, the theory leads to what we call a shape-dependent confinement correction that improves agreements with diffusion Monte Carlo calculations. The theory illustrates, for relatively strong confinement and/or high density, how the shape dependence on atom-atom interaction can come into play in a many-atom quantum system.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

The Empirical Research of the Correlation Between the Subject Characteristics and the Effectiveness of the Ideological and Political Education

In the teaching of ideological and political theory course, the subject does not accept the object passively. But the cognition, emotion, will and ability of the subject will be used in the acceptance process, and influence the acceptance effect. Different subjects have different cognition, emotion, will and ability, so as have different acceptance aims; background, interests, and ability, which eventually leads to different acceptance effects. There is no empirical test to explain the relationship between the acceptance subject characteristics and acceptance effect of ideological and political theory course. This paper has important practical significance to study the relationship between acceptance subject characteristics and the acceptance effect

Efficient Adaptive Sobel and Joint Significance Tests for Mediation Effects

Mediation analysis is an important statistical tool in many research fields. Its aim is to investigate the mechanism along the causal pathway between an exposure and an outcome. Particularly, the Sobel test and joint significance test are two popular statistical methods for testing mediation effects in practice. However, the drawback of both mediation testing methods is arising from the conservative type I error, which has reduced their powers and imposed some restrictions on their popularity and usefulness. As a matter of fact, this limitation is long-standing for the two methods in the literature. To fill this gap, we propose two novel data-adaptive tests for mediation effects, namely the adaptive Sobel test and the adaptive joint significance test, which have significant improvements over traditional Sobel and joint significance tests. Meanwhile, the proposed method is user-friendly without involving complicated procedures. The explicit expressions for size and power are derived, which ensure the theoretical rationality of our method. Furthermore, we extend the proposed adaptive Sobel and adaptive joint significance tests for multiple mediators with family-wise error rate (FWER) control. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of our mediation testing procedure. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of our method by analysing three real-world datasets with continuous, binary and time-to-event outcomes, respectively

Functionalized Aptamers for Detection of Small-Molecule Targets

Aptamers have recently gained considerable attention for small-molecule detection in diverse applications such as drug identification, medical diagnostics, and environmental monitoring. However, the performance of aptamer-based sensors has been greatly limited by the low target affinity and responsiveness of small-molecule binding aptamers. This dissertation describes several novel aptamer engineering and isolation strategies to remedy this problem. Specifically, we first develop a generally applicable strategy to engineer split aptamers containing two binding domains termed cooperative-binding split aptamers (CBSAs). CBSAs exhibit higher target binding affinity and are far more responsive in terms of target-induced split aptamer assembly compared to single-domain parent split aptamers from which they are derived. Using a cocaine-binding CBSA, we achieve specific fluorescence detection of as low as 50 nM cocaine in 10% saliva within 15 minutes. We then develop a general approach for creating rapid and sensitive CBSA-based enzyme-assisted target recycling (EATR)-amplified small-molecule sensors for sensitive target detection. Using this strategy, we develop a fluorescence assay for dehydroisoandrosterone-3-sulfate which achieves 100-fold enhanced target sensitivity relative to a non-EATR-based assay, and a colorimetric assay for visual detection of low-micromolar concentrations of cocaine. To simplify the sensor development process, , we establish a novel and simple SELEX strategy for directly isolating aptamers with intrinsic dye-displacement functionality which transduce target-binding events into a change of dye absorbance. As a demonstration, we isolate an aptamer against the synthetic cathinone 3,4-methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) that can detect MDPV at concentrations as low as 300 nM in a label-free, rapid, and simple dye-displacement assay. To further control the target-binding spectra of aptamers, we employ a novel parallel-and-serial SELEX strategy to isolate an aptamer binding 12 synthetic cathinones with nanomolar affinity but not 11 non-target compounds that are closely related in structure. Using this aptamer, instantaneous visual detection of synthetic cathinones at nanomolar concentrations in biological samples is achieved. In summary, this work demonstrates the great potential of novel aptamer engineering and isolation strategies in generating functional signal-reporting aptamers for sensitive small molecule detection. Importantly, the strategies described here are generalizable and can be used to develop aptamer-based assays for virtually any small-molecule targets

A Framework for Mediation Analysis with Massive Data

During recent years, mediation analysis has become increasingly popular in many research fields. Basically, the aim of mediation analysis is to investigate the direct effect of exposure on outcome together with indirect effects along the pathways from exposure to outcome. There has been a great number of articles that applied mediation analysis to data from hundreds or thousands of individuals. With the rapid development of technology, the volume of avaliable data increases exponentially, which brings new challenges to researchers. It is often computationally infeasible to directly conduct statistical analysis for large datasets. However, there are very few results on mediation analysis with massive data. In this paper, we propose to use the subsampled double bootstrap as well as divide-and-conquer algorithm to perform statistical mediation analysis for large-scale dataset. Extensive numerical simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of our method. Two real data examples are also provided to illustrate the usefulness of our approach in practical application

Akt isoforms in vascular disease.

The mammalian serine/threonine Akt kinases comprise three closely related isoforms: Akt1, Akt2 and Akt3. Akt activation has been implicated in both normal and disease processes, including in development and metabolism, as well as cancer and cardiovascular disease. Although Akt signalling has been identified as a promising therapeutic target in cancer, its role in cardiovascular disease is less clear. Importantly, accumulating evidence suggests that the three Akt isoforms exhibit distinct tissue expression profiles, localise to different subcellular compartments, and have unique modes of activation. Consistent with in vitro findings, genetic studies in mice show distinct effects of individual Akt isoforms on the pathophysiology of cardiovascular disease. This review summarises recent studies of individual Akt isoforms in atherosclerosis, vascular remodelling and aneurysm formation, to provide a comprehensive overview of Akt function in vascular disease.This work was supported by British Heart Foundation grants PG/11/ 112/29272, RG/08/009/25841 and RG/13/14/30314, and the Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre.This is the final version of the article. It was first published by Elsevier at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1537189115000397