Lensfree on-chip microscopy over a wide field-of-view using pixel super-resolution.

We demonstrate lensfree holographic microscopy on a chip to achieve approximately 0.6 microm spatial resolution corresponding to a numerical aperture of approximately 0.5 over a large field-of-view of approximately 24 mm2. By using partially coherent illumination from a large aperture (approximately 50 microm), we acquire lower resolution lensfree in-line holograms of the objects with unit fringe magnification. For each lensfree hologram, the pixel size at the sensor chip limits the spatial resolution of the reconstructed image. To circumvent this limitation, we implement a sub-pixel shifting based super-resolution algorithm to effectively recover much higher resolution digital holograms of the objects, permitting sub-micron spatial resolution to be achieved across the entire sensor chip active area, which is also equivalent to the imaging field-of-view (24 mm2) due to unit magnification. We demonstrate the success of this pixel super-resolution approach by imaging patterned transparent substrates, blood smear samples, as well as Caenoharbditis Elegans

Lensless wide-field fluorescent imaging on a chip using compressive decoding of sparse objects.

We demonstrate the use of a compressive sampling algorithm for on-chip fluorescent imaging of sparse objects over an ultra-large field-of-view (>8 cm(2)) without the need for any lenses or mechanical scanning. In this lensfree imaging technique, fluorescent samples placed on a chip are excited through a prism interface, where the pump light is filtered out by total internal reflection after exciting the entire sample volume. The emitted fluorescent light from the specimen is collected through an on-chip fiber-optic faceplate and is delivered to a wide field-of-view opto-electronic sensor array for lensless recording of fluorescent spots corresponding to the samples. A compressive sampling based optimization algorithm is then used to rapidly reconstruct the sparse distribution of fluorescent sources to achieve approximately 10 microm spatial resolution over the entire active region of the sensor-array, i.e., over an imaging field-of-view of >8 cm(2). Such a wide-field lensless fluorescent imaging platform could especially be significant for high-throughput imaging cytometry, rare cell analysis, as well as for micro-array research

Effects of essential oils distilled from some medicinal and aromatic plants against root knot nematode (Meloidogyne hapla)

Essential oils of medicinal and aromatic plants are important and promissing to manage the nematological problems in agriculture. In this study, five of the plants including Origanum onites, Salvia officinalis, Lippia citriodora, Mentha spicata and Mentha longifolia for egg hatching inhibition and four of the plants including Mentha piperita, Foeniculum vulgare, Coriandrum sativum and Ocimum basilicum for juvenile mortality were tested on Meloidogyne hapla under laboratory conditions. The oils were achieved by using water distillation method with a Clevenger apparatus. As the results of egg hatching trial, the highest egg hatching inhibition rate was found as 54% for O. onites. In addition, the other inhibition rates varied as 31.4%, 21.6%, 23.8%, 25.7% for the other plants, S. officinalis, M. longifolia, M. spicata and L. citriodora, respectively. Essential oil of each plant components were determined by gas chromatography (GC). Carvacrol was found as the main component (68.8%) of O. onites followed by Thujone 27.7% for S. officinalis, I-Menthone 76.9% for M. longifolia, Carvone 27.1% for M. spicata and Citral 19.3% for L. citriodora. For the juveile mortality, Mentha piperita showed the highest mortality rate as 93.2% and was followed by F. vulgare 72.9%, C. sativum 69.3% and O. basilicum 64.9%. The main component of the used plants were Carvone 39.3%, Anethole 40.2%, Linalool 81.3% and Linalool 54.6%, respectively.Keywords: Essential oil, Medicinal and aromatic plants, Meloidogyne hapl

METU interoperable database system

and Sevgi Foundation, Turkey) is a multidatabase system based on OMG's (OMG is a registered trademark, and CORBA, ORB, OMG IDL, Object Request Broker are trademarks of OMG) distributed object management architecture. It is implemented on top of a CORBA compliant ORB, namely, DEC's ObjectBroker (ObjectBroker is a registered trademark of DEC Corp.) [DDO96]. In MIND all local databases are encapsulated in generic Database Object. The interface of the generic Database Object is de ned in CORBA IDL and multiple implementations of this interface, one for each component DBMSs, namely, Oracle7 (Oracle7 is a trademark of Oracle Corp.), Sybase (Sybase is a trademark of Sybase Corp.), Adabas D (Adabas D is a trademark of Software AG Corp.) and MOOD [Dog94] are provided. MIND provides its users a common data model and a single global query language based on SQL. The main functionalities of MIND are global query processing, global transaction management and schema integration. The basic component classes in the system are

On transformation of query scheduling strategies in distributed and heterogeneous database systems

This work considers a problem of optimal query processing in heterogeneous and distributed database systems. A global query sub- mitted at a local site is decomposed into a number of queries processed at the remote sites. The partial results returned by the queries are in- tegrated at a local site. The paper addresses a problem of an optimal scheduling of queries that minimizes time spend on data integration of the partial results into the final answer. A global data model defined in this work provides a unified view of the heterogeneous data structures located at the remote sites and a system of operations is defined to ex- press the complex data integration procedures. This work shows that the transformations of an entirely simultaneous query processing strate- gies into a hybrid (simultaneous/sequential) strategy may in some cases lead to significantly faster data integration. We show how to detect such cases, what conditions must be satisfied to transform the schedules, and how to transform the schedules into the more efficient ones

Field-portable optofluidic plasmonic biosensor for wide-field and label-free monitoring of molecular interactions

We demonstrate a field-portable optofluidic plasmonic sensing device, weighing 40 g and 7.5 cm in height, which merges plasmonic microarrays with dual-wavelength lensfree on-chip imaging for real-time monitoring of protein binding kinetics