Was the Scanner Calibration Slide used for its intended purpose?

In the article, Scanner calibration revisited, BMC Bioinformatics 2010, 11:361, Dr. Pozhitkov used the Scanner Calibration Slide, a key product of Full Moon BioSystems to generate data in his study of microarray scanner PMT response and proposed a mathematic model for PMT response [1]. In the end, the author concluded that "Full Moon BioSystems calibration slides are inadequate for performing calibration," and recommended "against using these slides." We found these conclusions are seriously flawed and misleading, and his recommendation against using the Scanner Calibration Slide was not properly supported

Enhancing Higher Order Question of Student Through Problem Based Learning at Grade X MIA 6 of SMA N 4 Surakarta

The research aims to enhance the Higher Order Question of student through problem based learning in Biology at Grade X MIA 6 of SMA N 4 Surakarta. The research was a four-cycle action research conducted in academic year 2014/2015. All questions were analyzed based on revised Bloom Taxonomy. Data were validated using triangulation method. The result of the research showed that problem based learning effectively enhance student\u27s High Order Question (C4-C6). The percentage of each High Order Question (C4-C6) in pre cycle were 0%. The percentage of C4 type question at first cycle (73,14%), second cycle (52,13%), third cycle (56,05%), and fourth cycle (58,42%). The percentage of each High Order Question (C4-C6) in pre cycle were 0%. The percentage of C5 type question at first cycle (18,37%), second cycle (9,57%), third cycle (10,30%), and fourth cycle (58,42%). The percentage of each High Order Question (C4-C6) in pre cycle were 0%. The percentage of C6 type question at first cycle (8,16%), second cycle (38,30%), third cycle (41,18%) and fourth cycle (25,74%)

Cytokine concentration in peripheral blood of patients with colorectal cancer

IntroductionThe role of tumour secretory cytokines and peripheral circulatory cytokines in tumour progression has received increasing attention; however, the role of tumour-related inflammatory cytokines in colorectal cancer (CRC) remains unclear. In this study, the concentrations of various cytokines in the peripheral blood of healthy controls and patients with CRC at different stages were compared.MethodsPeripheral blood samples from 4 healthy participants and 22 colorectal cancer patients were examined. Luminex beads were used to evaluate concentration levels of 40 inflammatory cytokines in peripheral blood samples.ResultsIn peripheral blood, compared with healthy controls and early stage (I + II) CRC patients, advanced CRC (III + IV) patients had increased concentrations of mononuclear/macrophage chemotactic-related proteins (CCL7, CCL8, CCL15, CCL2, and MIF), M2 polarization-related factors (IL-1β, IL-4), neutrophil chemotactic and N2 polarization-related cytokines (CXCL2, CXCL5, CXCL6, IL-8), dendritic cells (DCs) chemotactic-related proteins (CCL19, CCL20, and CCL21), Natural killer (NK) cell related cytokines (CXCL9, CXCL10), Th2 cell-related cytokines (CCL1, CCL11, CCL26), CXCL12, IL-2, CCL25, and CCL27, and decreased IFN-γ and CX3CL1 concentrations. The differential upregulation of cytokines in peripheral blood was mainly concentrated in CRC patients with distant metastasis and was related to the size of the primary tumour; however, there was no significant correlation between cytokine levels in peripheral blood and the propensity and mechanism of lymph node metastasis.DiscussionDifferent types of immune cells may share the same chemokine receptors and can co-localise in response to the same chemokines and exert synergistic pro-tumour or anti-tumour functions in the tumour microenvironment. Chemokines and cytokines affect tumour metastasis and prognosis and may be potential targets for treatment

Potential of Core-Collapse Supernova Neutrino Detection at JUNO

JUNO is an underground neutrino observatory under construction in Jiangmen, China. It uses 20kton liquid scintillator as target, which enables it to detect supernova burst neutrinos of a large statistics for the next galactic core-collapse supernova (CCSN) and also pre-supernova neutrinos from the nearby CCSN progenitors. All flavors of supernova burst neutrinos can be detected by JUNO via several interaction channels, including inverse beta decay, elastic scattering on electron and proton, interactions on C12 nuclei, etc. This retains the possibility for JUNO to reconstruct the energy spectra of supernova burst neutrinos of all flavors. The real time monitoring systems based on FPGA and DAQ are under development in JUNO, which allow prompt alert and trigger-less data acquisition of CCSN events. The alert performances of both monitoring systems have been thoroughly studied using simulations. Moreover, once a CCSN is tagged, the system can give fast characterizations, such as directionality and light curve

Detection of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background with JUNO

As an underground multi-purpose neutrino detector with 20 kton liquid scintillator, Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is competitive with and complementary to the water-Cherenkov detectors on the search for the diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB). Typical supernova models predict 2-4 events per year within the optimal observation window in the JUNO detector. The dominant background is from the neutral-current (NC) interaction of atmospheric neutrinos with 12C nuclei, which surpasses the DSNB by more than one order of magnitude. We evaluated the systematic uncertainty of NC background from the spread of a variety of data-driven models and further developed a method to determine NC background within 15\% with {\it{in}} {\it{situ}} measurements after ten years of running. Besides, the NC-like backgrounds can be effectively suppressed by the intrinsic pulse-shape discrimination (PSD) capabilities of liquid scintillators. In this talk, I will present in detail the improvements on NC background uncertainty evaluation, PSD discriminator development, and finally, the potential of DSNB sensitivity in JUNO

Real-time Monitoring for the Next Core-Collapse Supernova in JUNO

Core-collapse supernova (CCSN) is one of the most energetic astrophysical events in the Universe. The early and prompt detection of neutrinos before (pre-SN) and during the SN burst is a unique opportunity to realize the multi-messenger observation of the CCSN events. In this work, we describe the monitoring concept and present the sensitivity of the system to the pre-SN and SN neutrinos at the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), which is a 20 kton liquid scintillator detector under construction in South China. The real-time monitoring system is designed with both the prompt monitors on the electronic board and online monitors at the data acquisition stage, in order to ensure both the alert speed and alert coverage of progenitor stars. By assuming a false alert rate of 1 per year, this monitoring system can be sensitive to the pre-SN neutrinos up to the distance of about 1.6 (0.9) kpc and SN neutrinos up to about 370 (360) kpc for a progenitor mass of 30$M_{\odot}$ for the case of normal (inverted) mass ordering. The pointing ability of the CCSN is evaluated by using the accumulated event anisotropy of the inverse beta decay interactions from pre-SN or SN neutrinos, which, along with the early alert, can play important roles for the followup multi-messenger observations of the next Galactic or nearby extragalactic CCSN.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figure

Comprehensive analysis of signal transduction in three-dimensional ECM-based tumor cell cultures

Analysis of signal transduction and protein phosphorylation is fundamental to understand physiological and pathological cell behavior as well as identification of novel therapeutic targets. Despite the fact that more physiological three-dimensional cell culture assays are increasingly used, particularly proteomics and phosphoproteomics remain challenging due to easy, robust and reproducible sample preparation. Here, we present an easy-to-perform, reliable and time-efficient method for the production of 3D cell lysates without compromising cell adhesion before cell lysis. The samples can be used for Western blotting as well as phosphoproteome array technology. This technique would be of interest for researchers working in all fields of biology and drug development

Grain Refinement by Second Phase Particles under Applied Stress in ZK60 Mg Alloy with Y through Phase Field Simulation

Based on the principle of grain refinement caused by the second-phase particles, a phase field model was built to describe the recrystallization process in the ZK60 alloy system with Y added under applied stress between temperatures 573 and 673 K for 140 min duration. The simulation of grain growth with second phase particles and applied stress during annealing process on industrial scale on the condition of real time-space was achieved. Quantitative analysis was carried out and some useful laws were revealed in ZK60 alloy system. The second phase particles had a promoting effect on the grain refinement, however the effect weakened significantly when the content exceeded 1.5%. Our simulation results reveal the existence of a critical range of second phase particle size of 0.3–0.4 μm, within which a microstructure of fine grains can be obtained. Applied stress increased the grain coarsening rate significantly when the stress was more than 135 MPa. The critical size of the second phase particles was 0.4–0.75 μm when the applied stress was 135 MPa. Finally, a microstructure with a grain size of 11.8–13.8 μm on average could be obtained when the second phase particles had a content of 1.5% and a size of 0.4–0.75 μm with an applied stress less than 135 Mpa after 30 min annealing at 573 K

E2TIMT: Efficient and Effective Modal Adapter for Text Image Machine Translation

Text image machine translation (TIMT) aims to translate texts embedded in images from one source language to another target language. Existing methods, both two-stage cascade and one-stage end-to-end architectures, suffer from different issues. The cascade models can benefit from the large-scale optical character recognition (OCR) and MT datasets but the two-stage architecture is redundant. The end-to-end models are efficient but suffer from training data deficiency. To this end, in our paper, we propose an end-to-end TIMT model fully making use of the knowledge from existing OCR and MT datasets to pursue both an effective and efficient framework. More specifically, we build a novel modal adapter effectively bridging the OCR encoder and MT decoder. End-to-end TIMT loss and cross-modal contrastive loss are utilized jointly to align the feature distribution of the OCR and MT tasks. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the existing two-stage cascade models and one-stage end-to-end models with a lighter and faster architecture. Furthermore, the ablation studies verify the generalization of our method, where the proposed modal adapter is effective to bridge various OCR and MT models.Comment: Accepted at The 17th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2023