Temperature insensitive refractometer using core and cladding modes in open-top ridge waveguide

In order to overcome the well-known limitation of temperature instability in Bragg grating waveguide sensors, a temperature insensitive open-top ridge waveguide refractometer is developed by using a cladding mode resonance as a temperature reference. The relative shift of the core mode resonance to cladding mode resonance is used to measure the refractive index of substances under test. Specifically, the device fabricated here produces a relative resonance shift of 1 pm for every 5 × 10-4 of measured index change, with a temperature sensitivity ∼ 0.5 pm/°C

1000 Genomes-based metaanalysis identifies 10 novel loci for kidney function

HapMap imputed genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have revealed >50 loci at which common variants with minor allele frequency >5% are associated with kidney function. GWAS using more complete reference sets for imputation, such as those from The 1000 Genomes project, promise to identify novel loci that have been missed by previous efforts. To investigate the value of such a more complete variant catalog, we conducted a GWAS meta-Analysis of kidney function based on the estimated glomerular filtration rate (EGFR) in 110,517 European ancestry participants using 1000 Genomes imputed data. We identified 10 novel loci with p-value < 5 × 10-8 previously missed by HapMap-based GWAS. Six of these loci (HOXD8, ARL15, PIK3R1, EYA4, ASTN2, and EPB41L3) are tagged by common SNPs unique to the 1000 Genomes reference panel. Using pathway analysis, we identified 39 significant (FDR < 0.05) genes and 127 significantly (FDR < 0.05) enriched gene sets, wh