Maximizing analytical precision: exploring the advantages of ratiometric strategy in fluorescence, Raman, electrochemical, and mass spectrometry detection

Ratiometric strategy are an invaluable method that helps to detect and quantify analytes. This approach relies on measuring changes in the ratio of two or more signals to improve the accuracy and sensitivity of the results. Ratiometric strategies are widely used in a variety of fields including biomedical, environmental monitoring and food safety. It is particularly popular when traditional single-signal based detection methods are not feasible, especially when interfering substances severely affect the detection. In addition, ratiometric methods have the potential to improve the accuracy and reliability of analyte detection, leading to better results in a variety of complex environments. The article provides a comprehensive review of ratiometric strategy, focusing on ratiometric fluorescent nanoprobes for the visual detection of analytes. This paper also discusses the design of ratiometric two-photon fluorescent probes for biomedical imaging, the synthesis of ratiometric surface-enhanced Raman scattering nanoprobes for the imaging of intracellular analytes, the development of ratiometric molecularly imprinted electrochemical sensors for detection of electroactive species, and the use of isotopically-labeled internal standards in matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization for ratiometric analysis. The article not only discusses each technique in detail, including its principles, advantages, potential applications, and limitations, but also highlights recent advances in each method and possible future directions

On Optimal Neighbor Discovery

Mobile devices apply neighbor discovery (ND) protocols to wirelessly initiate a first contact within the shortest possible amount of time and with minimal energy consumption. For this purpose, over the last decade, a vast number of ND protocols have been proposed, which have progressively reduced the relation between the time within which discovery is guaranteed and the energy consumption. In spite of the simplicity of the problem statement, even after more than 10 years of research on this specific topic, new solutions are still proposed even today. Despite the large number of known ND protocols, given an energy budget, what is the best achievable latency still remains unclear. This paper addresses this question and for the first time presents safe and tight, duty-cycle-dependent bounds on the worst-case discovery latency that no ND protocol can beat. Surprisingly, several existing protocols are indeed optimal, which has not been known until now. We conclude that there is no further potential to improve the relation between latency and duty-cycle, but future ND protocols can improve their robustness against beacon collisions.Comment: Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (ACM SIGCOMM), 201

Abaloparatide Maintains Normal Rat Blood Calcium Level in Part Via 1,25-Dihydroxyvitamin D/osteocalcin Signaling Pathway

The PTH-related peptide(1-34) analog, abaloparatide (ABL), is the second anabolic drug available for the treatment of osteoporosis. Previous research demonstrated that ABL had a potent anabolic effect but caused hypercalcemia at a significantly lower rate. However, the mechanism by which ABL maintains the stability of blood calcium levels remains poorly understood. Our in vivo data showed that ABL treatment (40 µg/kg/day for 7 days) significantly increased rat blood level of 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D [1,25-(OH)2D] without raising the blood calcium value. ABL also significantly augmented the carboxylated osteocalcin (Gla-Ocn) in the blood and bone that is synthesized by osteoblasts, and increased noncarboxylated Ocn, which is released from the bone matrix to the circulation because of osteoclast activation. The in vitro data showed that ABL (10 nM for 24 hours) had little direct effects on 1,25-(OH)2D synthesis and Gla-Ocn formation in nonrenal cells (rat osteoblast-like cells). However, ABL significantly promoted both 1,25-(OH)2D and Gla-Ocn formation when 25-hydroxyvitamin D, the substrate of 1α-hydroxylase, was added to the cells. Thus, the increased 1,25-(OH)2D levels in rats treated by ABL result in high levels of Gla-Ocn and transient calcium increase in the circulation. Gla-Ocn then mediates calcium ions in the extracellular fluid at bone sites to bind to hydroxyapatite at bone surfaces. This regulation by Gla-Ocn at least, in part, maintains the stability of blood calcium levels during ABL treatment. We conclude that the signaling pathway of ABL/1,25-(OH)2D/Gla-Ocn contributes to calcium homeostasis and may help understand the mechanism of ABL for osteoporosis therapy

Real-time Automatic M-mode Echocardiography Measurement with Panel Attention from Local-to-Global Pixels

Motion mode (M-mode) recording is an essential part of echocardiography to measure cardiac dimension and function. However, the current diagnosis cannot build an automatic scheme, as there are three fundamental obstructs: Firstly, there is no open dataset available to build the automation for ensuring constant results and bridging M-mode echocardiography with real-time instance segmentation (RIS); Secondly, the examination is involving the time-consuming manual labelling upon M-mode echocardiograms; Thirdly, as objects in echocardiograms occupy a significant portion of pixels, the limited receptive field in existing backbones (e.g., ResNet) composed from multiple convolution layers are inefficient to cover the period of a valve movement. Existing non-local attentions (NL) compromise being unable real-time with a high computation overhead or losing information from a simplified version of the non-local block. Therefore, we proposed RAMEM, a real-time automatic M-mode echocardiography measurement scheme, contributes three aspects to answer the problems: 1) provide MEIS, a dataset of M-mode echocardiograms for instance segmentation, to enable consistent results and support the development of an automatic scheme; 2) propose panel attention, local-to-global efficient attention by pixel-unshuffling, embedding with updated UPANets V2 in a RIS scheme toward big object detection with global receptive field; 3) develop and implement AMEM, an efficient algorithm of automatic M-mode echocardiography measurement enabling fast and accurate automatic labelling among diagnosis. The experimental results show that RAMEM surpasses existing RIS backbones (with non-local attention) in PASCAL 2012 SBD and human performances in real-time MEIS tested. The code of MEIS and dataset are available at https://github.com/hanktseng131415go/RAME

Forest leaf litter beetles of Taiwan: first DNA barcodes and first insight into the fauna

We report the publication of 953 DNA barcodes of forest leaf litter beetles from central Taiwan, in total representing 334 spe- cies of 36 beetle families. This is the first bulk of data from the Taiwanese Leaf Litter beetles project focused on uncovering the under-explored diversity of leaf litter beetles across Taiwan. Based on these data, we provide the first records of the following taxa for Taiwan: family Sphindidae (genus Aspidiphorus Ziegler, 1821); tribes Trichonychini, Ctenistini, and Bythinoplectini (all Staphylinidae: Pselaphinae); genera Gyrelon Hinton, 1942, Thyroderus Sharp, 1885, Cautomus Sharp, 1885 (all Cerylonidae), Dermatohomoeus Hlisnikovský, 1963 (Leiodidae), Paraploderus Herman, 1970 (Staphylinidae: Oxytelinae), Thinocharis Kraatz, 1859 (Staphylinidae: Paederinae), Cephennodes Reitter, 1884, Napoconnus Franz, 1957 (both Staphylinidae: Scydmaeninae), Bicava Belon, 1884 (Latridiidae), Otibazo Morimoto, 1961, Seleuca Pascoe, 1871 and Acallinus Morimoto, 1962 (all Curculioni- dae); species Oodes (Lachnocrepis) japonicus (Bates, 1873) (Carabidae: Licininae), Drusilla obliqua (Bernhauer, 1916) (Staphylin- idae: Aleocharinae) and Coccotrypes advena Blandford, 1894 (Curculionidae: Scolytinae). The records of Anapleus Horn, 1873 (Histeridae) and Batraxis Reitter, 1882 (Staphylinidae: Pselaphinae) have been confirmed. The male of Sivacrypticus taiwanicus Kaszab, 1964 (Archeocrypticidae) is described for the first time. Gyrelon jenpani Hu, Fikáček & Matsumoto, sp. nov. (Cerylon- idae) is described, illustrated, and compared with related species. DNA barcodes associated larvae of 42 species with adults, we are concisely illustrating some of these: Oodes japonicus, Perigona cf. nigriceps Dejean, 1831 (both Carabidae), Ptilodactyla sp. (Ptilodactylidae), Maltypus ryukyuanus Wittmer, 1970 (Cantharidae), Drusilla obliqua, Myrmecocephalus brevisulcus (Pace, 2008), Diochus sp., Mimopinophilus sp. (all Staphylinidae), Stelidota multiguttata Reitter, 1877, Lasiodites inaequalis (Grouvelle, 1914) (both Nitidulidae), Lagria scutellaris Pic, 1910, and Anaedus spinicornis Kaszab, 1973 (both Tenebrionidae). We also report the first cases of Rickettsia infections in Scydmaeninae and Pselaphinae. All data (sequences, metadata, and voucher photos) are made public in BOLD database and in a Zenodo Archive

Decrease in seroprevalence of Hepatitis A after the implementation of nationwide disposable tableware use in Taiwan

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Taiwan is an endemic area of viral hepatitis, including hepatitis A, which is transmitted mainly from the fecal-oral route. In order to reduce the transmission through food intake, the government implemented a policy of nationwide disposal tableware use in public eating places in 1982. We conducted a study to estimate the seroprevalence of Hepatitis A in a group of workers in Taiwan in 2005, determine the risk factors, and compare seroprevalence to published estimates in Taiwan to evaluate changes in the seroprevalence after the implementation of the nationwide disposal tableware use.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We recruited workers of an industrial park during their annual health examinations in 2005 and measured their anti-hepatitis A virus IgG titer using microparticle enzyme immunoassay. We compared the seroprevalence across different birth cohorts within the study population and also analyzed data from previous studies.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The overall sero-positive rate was 22.0% in the 11,777 participants. The rate was much lower among those who were covered by the program since birth (born after 1982) in comparison with those who were not (2.7% vs. 25.3%, p < 0.001). From the analyses of data from pervious studies, we found the age-specific rates were similar in cohorts born in or after 1982 across studies conducted in different time periods but decreased with the calendar year in cohorts born before 1982. In particular, the age-specific seroprevalence dropped to less than one third in a three-year period among those who were born around 1982.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Data from both the current and previous studies in different time periods supported the effectiveness of disposal tableware in preventing the transmission of hepatitis A.</p

Computational Comparative Study of Tuberculosis Proteomes Using a Model Learned from Signal Peptide Structures

Secretome analysis is important in pathogen studies. A fundamental and convenient way to identify secreted proteins is to first predict signal peptides, which are essential for protein secretion. However, signal peptides are highly complex functional sequences that are easily confused with transmembrane domains. Such confusion would obviously affect the discovery of secreted proteins. Transmembrane proteins are important drug targets, but very few transmembrane protein structures have been determined experimentally; hence, prediction of the structures is essential. In the field of structure prediction, researchers do not make assumptions about organisms, so there is a need for a general signal peptide predictor

Evidence that breast cancer risk at the 2q35 locus is mediated through IGFBP5 regulation.

GWAS have identified a breast cancer susceptibility locus on 2q35. Here we report the fine mapping of this locus using data from 101,943 subjects from 50 case-control studies. We genotype 276 SNPs using the 'iCOGS' genotyping array and impute genotypes for a further 1,284 using 1000 Genomes Project data. All but two, strongly correlated SNPs (rs4442975 G/T and rs6721996 G/A) are excluded as candidate causal variants at odds against >100:1. The best functional candidate, rs4442975, is associated with oestrogen receptor positive (ER+) disease with an odds ratio (OR) in Europeans of 0.85 (95% confidence interval=0.84-0.87; P=1.7 × 10(-43)) per t-allele. This SNP flanks a transcriptional enhancer that physically interacts with the promoter of IGFBP5 (encoding insulin-like growth factor-binding protein 5) and displays allele-specific gene expression, FOXA1 binding and chromatin looping. Evidence suggests that the g-allele confers increased breast cancer susceptibility through relative downregulation of IGFBP5, a gene with known roles in breast cell biology