Longitudinal wastewater sampling in buildings reveals temporal dynamics of metabolites.

Direct sampling of building wastewater has the potential to enable "precision public health" observations and interventions. Temporal sampling offers additional dynamic information that can be used to increase the informational content of individual metabolic "features", but few studies have focused on high-resolution sampling. Here, we sampled three spatially close buildings, revealing individual metabolomics features, retention time (rt) and mass-to-charge ratio (mz) pairs, that often possess similar stationary statistical properties, as expected from aggregate sampling. However, the temporal profiles of features-providing orthogonal information to physicochemical properties-illustrate that many possess different feature temporal dynamics (fTDs) across buildings, with large and unpredictable single day deviations from the mean. Internal to a building, numerous and seemingly unrelated features, with mz and rt differences up to hundreds of Daltons and seconds, display highly correlated fTDs, suggesting non-obvious feature relationships. Data-driven building classification achieves high sensitivity and specificity, and extracts building-identifying features found to possess unique dynamics. Analysis of fTDs from many short-duration samples allows for tailored community monitoring with applicability in public health studies

Social Trajectory Planning for Urban Autonomous Surface Vessels

In this article, we propose a trajectory planning algorithm that enables autonomous surface vessels to perform socially compliant navigation in a city's canal. The key idea behind the proposed algorithm is to adopt an optimal control formulation in which the deviation of movements of the autonomous vessel from nominal movements of human-operated vessels is penalized. Consequently, given a pair of origin and destination points, it finds vessel trajectories that resemble those of human-operated vessels. To formulate this, we adopt kernel density estimation (KDE) to build a nominal movement model of human-operated vessels from a prerecorded trajectory dataset, and use a Kullback-Leibler control cost to measure the deviation of the autonomous vessel's movements from the model. We establish an analogy between our trajectory planning approach and the maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning (MaxEntIRL) approach to explain how our approach can learn the navigation behavior of human-operated vessels. On the other hand, we distinguish our approach from the MaxEntIRL approach in that it does not require well-defined bases, often referred to as features, to construct its cost function as required in many of inverse reinforcement learning approaches in the trajectory planning context. Through experiments using a dataset of vessel trajectories collected from the automatic identification system, we demonstrate that the trajectories generated by our approach resemble those of human-operated vessels and that using them for canal navigation is beneficial in reducing head-on encounters between vessels and improving navigation safety. Learning & Autonomous Contro

Gamma-Oxo-1-pyrenebutyric acid used for fluorescent detection of serum albumins and trypsin

Fluorescence spectroscopy, one of the most informative analytical techniques, has played and continues to play a key role in modern research due to its high sensitivity, rapid response rate, and relatively low cost. Herein we report its application to the detection of the proteins bovine serum albumin (BSA) and human serum albumin (HSA) as well as a protease (trypsin). The detection is based on a fluorescent molecule: gamma-oxo-1-pyrenebutyric acid (OPBA), which exhibits a quenched fluorescent change at 455 nm toward serum albumins (SAs). OPBA interacted with SAs with a 1 : 1 stoichiometry and a strong affinity due to p-stacking, hydrophobic interactions, and hydrogen bonding interactions. The microenvironment created by HSA and BSA played an important role in their respective interactions with OPBA. In addition, OPBA can be used for monitoring trypsin by the cleavage of HSA or BSA in the presence of copper ions, and the successful cleavage of SAs was demonstrated by the SDS polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) results. This indirect detection of trypsin might be developed as a strategy for sensors without substrate selection. All of these tests do not require sophisticated instrumentation and should be applicable to standard fluorescence assays.open112120sciescopu

Comparison of the performance of SAD models for single-person and multi-person gut microbial communities.

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