Expanding the mutational and clinical spectrum of Chinese intellectual disability patients with two novel CTCF variants

CCCTC-Binding Factor (CTCF) is a protein-coding gene involved in transcriptional regulation, insulator activity, and regulation of chromatin structure, and is closely associated with intellectual developmental disorders. In this study, we report two unrelated Chinese patients with intellectual disability (ID). According to variant interpretation results from exome sequencing data and RNA-seq data, we present two novel heterozygous CTCF variants, NM_006565.3:c.1519_2184del (p. Glu507_Arg727delins47) and NM_006565.3:c.1838_1852del (p.Glu613_Pro617del), found in two distinct unrelated patients, respectively. Moreover, RNA-seq data of patient 1 indicated the absence of the mutant transcript, while in patient 2, the RNA-seq data revealed a CTCF mRNA transcript with a deletion of 15 nucleotides. Notably, the RNA sequencing data revealed 507 differentially expressed genes shared between these two patients. Specifically, among them, 194 were down-regulated, and 313 were up-regulated, primarily involved in gene regulation and cellular response. Our study expands the genetic and clinical spectrum of CTCF and advances our understanding of the pathogenesis of CTCF in vivo

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Hidden folk.

Hidden Folk is a short film that follows the day in the life of Lilian Mah, a successful curator and art educator. She is poised to wrap up the gallery show of her burgeoning career but the hours leading up to the grand finale paves way for a series of intimate encounters with her ex-lover, close friend and distant parent. Lilian chases to escape a devastating scandal threatening to send her perfect world crashing. Set in the context of Singapore which in recent years have been rife with scandals, the film hopes to uncover the hidden stories of the parties involved and present a new perspective of these life-changing events. Hidden Folk is shot and produced by one-half of FLIM Productions, consisting of four students: Thong Kay Wee, Tan Sihan, Ashley Arriola and Ye Xinmin. Guidance and supervision are fronted by Mr Kym Campbell. This report details the year-long process from conceptualization to post-production. It seeks to address various artistic and practical decisions in influencing the final product. The report also highlights the challenges faced along the journey and solutions undertaken.Bachelor of Communication Studie

Rapid light output degradation of GaN-based packaged LED in the early stage of humidity test

An initial sharp decrease in the light output of a high-power light-emitting diode is observed when it is exposed to humid condition. TGA and energy-dispersive system analyses confirm the possibility of moisture entrapment in the silicone encapsulation; moreover, the light scattering model verifies qualitatively the scattering of the light due to the entrapped moisture, and it is this scattering that renders an initial sharp drop in the light output. The finding shows the importance of pore size of the silicone gel in order to prevent such sharp decrease in the light output under a humid environment

Radar Transformer: An Object Classification Network Based on 4D MMW Imaging Radar

Automotive millimeter-wave (MMW) radar is essential in autonomous vehicles due to its robustness in all weather conditions. Traditional commercial automotive radars are limited by their resolution, which makes the object classification task difficult. Thus, the concept of a new generation of four-dimensional (4D) imaging radar was proposed. It has high azimuth and elevation resolution and contains Doppler information to produce a high-quality point cloud. In this paper, we propose an object classification network named Radar Transformer. The algorithm takes the attention mechanism as the core and adopts the combination of vector attention and scalar attention to make full use of the spatial information, Doppler information, and reflection intensity information of the radar point cloud to realize the deep fusion of local attention features and global attention features. We generated an imaging radar classification dataset and completed manual annotation. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieved an overall classification accuracy of 94.9%, which is more suitable for processing radar point clouds than the popular deep learning frameworks and shows promising performance

Ensuring accuracy in optical and electrical measurement of ultra-bright LEDs during reliability test

In order to accurately estimate the lifetime of Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), accelerated stress tests have to be performed, and measurements done throughout the tests should be free of artifact and repeatable to ensure accurate observations of the degradation of the LEDs. In this work, measurements artifact arising from DC biasing and PWM settings were first presented. Electrical measurements consistency was then studied. Optimized setting for accurate measurement is obtained using Response Surface Method with Central Composite Design, and the setting is verified through experiments