#New microscope technique could speed identification of deadly bacteria A new way of rapidly identifying bacteria,
may change the way doctors approach treatment for patients who develop potentially deadly infections and may also help the food industry screen against contamination with harmful pathogens, according to researchers.
A new way of rapidly identifying bacteria, which requires a slight modification to a simple microscope,
may change the way doctors approach treatment for patients who develop potentially deadly infections and may also help the food industry screen against contamination with harmful pathogens,
according to researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, South korea.
and computer software to analyze the images and identify them by comparing them to other, known bacteria.
The software uses a machine-learning algorithm--the sort computers connected to security cameras might use for automated facial recognition.
which is still the gold standard in the health care industry for making a definitive diagnosis. Also routinely used today is a newer method for rapidly identifying bacteria based on a DNA-analysis technique called quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qpcr),
The challenge of meeting clinical needs in the developing world was one of the motivations behind the work, according to the KAIST team.
"This means the present method can be utilized as a prescreening test for point-of-care bacterial diagnosis for various applications including medicine and food hygiene.""
"Why Speed Matters in Infection Control In hospitals and clinics worldwide, bacterial infections are a major source of illness,
In the most severe cases, bacterial poisoning causes severe disease and syndromes like sepsis, meningitis, pneumonia,
and gastroenteritis--all of which can be deadly unless the patient is given immediate and appropriate treatment.
The true challenge of fighting those infections is time. In order to best treat their patients, doctors would like to know exactly which bacteria they are infected with,
but the lost hours or days spent identifying the exact pathogen can make the road to recovery that much steeper.
Sepsis, for instance, can develop so rapidly that mortality has been seen to increase by 9 percent per hour until treatment is given.
Waiting two days may kill the patient, Park added. For that reason, many hospital-acquired infections are treated presumptively,
before they are identified definitively, using broad-spectrum antibiotics. These powerful combinations of potent drugs are often effective,
allowing doctors to prescribe the best drugs available to treat an infection and improving outcomes for people with hospital-acquired infections--though the effectiveness of the approach remains to be proven in future clinical trials.
In their initial experiments, Park and his colleagues showed as a proof of principle that they could identify bacteria with high accuracy.
The first three are known all pathogens to infect humans through the food chain or via hospital-acquired infections.
which is the base for Anthrax. Under a microscope, all four of these rodlike bacteria look nearly identical.
They then applied software they designed to the analysis, which used a conventional approach to statistical classification known as machine learning--a sorting strategy based on pattern similarities that has been used extensively in applications like facial recognition software.
This was the first time anyone had applied machine learning to Fourier Transform light scattering data, Park said. They are now looking to extend their initial work to see
if they can distinguish between several types of bacterial subgroups--to identify the most drug resistant or virulent strains from the innocuous ones.
In addition to helping in the clinic the new method may be useful in the food industry or for homeland security applications.
In principle, the approach could be scaled up to screen for contaminated food or suspicious packages s
#New approach for treating idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis Arrayprof. Dr. Oliver Eickelberg and Dr. Claudia Staab-Weijnitz of the Comprehensive Pneumology Center (CPC) at Helmholtz Zentrum München and their colleagues at LMU University Hospital in Munich and Yale university
School of medicine have discovered now a new therapeutic target for IPF. The main focus of their research was to identify causative mechanisms involved in the disease.
The researchers analyzed microarray data of samples from German patients and from an IPF cohort of the Lung Tissue Research Consortium in the U s. The analysis revealed elevated levels of the protein FKBP10
in the lungs of IPF patients. The researchers hypothesized that if the production or activity of the protein could be inhibited,
this might lead to a new therapeutic approach. Further experiments confirmed that knockdown of this protein in IPF fibroblasts diminished the collagen synthesis."Thus,
FKBP10 represents a potential new target molecule for the individualized therapy of IPF, "said Claudia Staab-Weijnitz."
"In the future, these results could also lead to new therapeutic options for the treatment of other fibrotic diseases."
"Arrayeickelberg has made the study of IPF one of his key priority research areas. Together with his team of researchers, he is studying the pathogenic mechanisms with the aim to develop causal therapies--and thus one day to actually cure IPF.
In the short term, however, the main focus is on delaying the progression of the disease
and alleviating the symptoms.""My foremost objective is to help develop an effective treatment that will completely halt the progression of IPF in the patient,
"said Eickelberg.""These approaches are developed best in international networks. This cooperative project is a direct result of the research stay of Professor Kaminski (Yale) at the CPC through the support of a Helmholtz International Fellow Award (HIFA.""
""With our translational approach,"said Eickelberg, "we want to help alleviate the suffering of patients with lung disease."
"In the case of IPF, the researchers now want to establish a drug screening assay and begin clinical trials with an FKBP10 inhibitor,
an agent to inhibit the production or activity of the FKBP10 protein i
#Ultrasound, algorithms to diagnose bacterial meningitis in babies Three researchers from Spain and one from UK, Javier Jiménez, Carlos Castro, Berta Martí and Ian Butterworth,
specialists in biomedical engineering, have developed a device which will allow bacterial meningitis to be diagnosed in babies in seconds with a high-resolution ultrasound of the fontanelle.
The system, which aims to revolutionise the detection of this illness, has already been tested on a small sample of patients at the La paz University Hospital and in ex vivo tissues of animal models.
The project has been financed by Madrid-MIT M+Visión a consortium that wants to boost the collaboration between research centres and hospitals in the autonomous community of Madrid with the Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT) and other institutions in the Boston area (USA.
Carlos Castro tells Sinc, in a telephone interview from the Research Laboratory of Electronics of MIT in Boston,
that the idea of developing this device -which already has a prototype-was to"facilitate the diagnosis of bacterial meningitis using imaging technologies and algorithms."
"Array"We were searching for an alternative to the lumbar puncture (LP), the only existing procedure up until now for its diagnosis,
which is difficult to perform on babies and very painful,"says the researcher. This test consists of extracting a sample of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) with a syringe inserted between two vertebrae in the lumbar region."
"We witnessed a LP on a 29-day-old baby that had arrived at the accident and emergency department at Boston Children's Hospital with a fever.
It took three paediatricians and five attempts to be able to extract a CSF sample.
It was awful, "he remembers. Knowing the cellularity-the relationship between the blood-forming cells
and the adipose tissue expressed in percentage of cells-"is important to start the treatment as soon as possible.
which tell whether there is an infection in the fluid, can take between 24 and 48 hours"says Castro.
meningitis is not the cause of the fever in babies and therefore, "lumbar punctures do not benefit the patient in any way."
which would indicate the cellularity in CSF in a simple, economical and noninvasive way for newborns and babies on suspicion of infection.
The image obtained is analysed then by image-processing algorithms to determine the presence of cells indicating infection
if there are any, indicates the expert.""This entire process lasts just seconds, "he reiterates.""Therefore-he adds-it not only provides the doctor with an image,
but information about the presence or absence of cells in the cerebrospinal fluid. This means it can be used without having to undergo specialised training,
and as it is portable, it can be made available to any intensive care or accident and emergency unit and observation or hospital room."
"The team believes that their system will mean a breakthrough for diagnosing bacterial meningitis in babies
Madrid hospitals La paz, Quirón and San Carlos also provided significant assistance. In Boston, they worked with Massachusetts General Hospital.
Arrayto date, 300,000 euros has been invested in the project, awarded by the Madrid-MIT M+Visión Consortium.
This amount allowed the group to initially test the first prototype in Hospital La paz. They are now waiting on further funding to be able to continue with the technological development and a pilot study in patients.
Other plans of these young engineers include applying for three device patents and the creation of a company to put it in the market.
Castro believes that, with sufficient funding, they will be able to have a finished product that complies with European regulations by the end of 2018 f
#'No-inkcolor printing with nanomaterials In this case, the print features are very fine--visible only with the aid of a high-powered electron microscope.
Arrayarraythe researchers'printing surface consists of a sandwich-like structure made up of two thin films of silver separated by a"spacer"film of silica.
The top layer of silver film is 25 nanometers thick and is punctured with tiny holes created by a microfabrication process known as focused ion beam milling.
The bottom layer of silver is four times thicker than the top layer but still minuscule at 100 nanometers.
Between the top and bottom films lies a 45-nanometer silica dielectric spacer. The researchers created a scaled-down template of the athletic logo and drilled out tiny perforations on the top layer of the metamaterial structure.
Under a scanning electron microscope, the template looks like a needlepoint pattern of the logo. The researchers then beamed light through the holes to create the logo using no ink--only the interaction of the materials and light.
By adjusting the hole size of the top layer, light at the desired frequency was beamed into the material with a perfect absorption.
This allowed researchers to create different colors in the reflected light and thereby accurately reproduce the S&t athletic logo with nanoscale color palettes.
The researchers further adjusted the holes to alter the logo's official green and gold color scheme to introduce four new colors (an orange ampersand,
""To reproduce a colorful artwork with our nanoscale color palettes, we replaced different areas in the original image with different nanostructures with specified hole sizes to represent various visible colors,
"says Dr. Xiaodong Yang, an assistant professor at Missouri S&t, who leads the Nanoscale Optics Laboratory in the university's mechanical and aerospace engineering department."
"We chose the athletic logo to fill that need.""""Unlike the printing process of an inkjet or laserjet printer, where mixed color pigments are used,
there is no color ink used in our structural printing process--only different hole sizes on a thin metallic layer,
"says Dr. Jie Gao, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Missouri S&t and a co-author of the paper.
In their paper, the authors note that the process resulted in"pure colors with high brightness"with little need for protective coatings.
pigment-free color printing and relevant applications such as security marking and information storage.""Other co-authors of the Scientific Reports paper are Dr. Fei Cheng, a researcher at Missouri S&t's Nanoscale Optics Laboratory,
and Dr. Ting S. Luk of the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New mexico i
#Stable perovskite solar cells developed through structural simplification Lead-halide-based perovskite (hereinafter simply referred to as perovskite) has been used as a solar cell material since six years ago.
Perovskite solar cells are promising low-cost and highly-efficient next-generation solar cells because they can be produced through low-temperature processes such as spin coating,
and generate a large amount of electricity due to their high optical absorption together with the high open-circuit voltage.
As such, the research on perovskite solar cells is making rapid progress. In order to identify the semiconducting properties of perovskites
and formulate guidelines for the development of highly efficient solar cell materials, NIMS launched an ad hoc Team on Perovskite PV Cells last October led by the deputy director-general of GREEN.
While the conventional perovskite solar cells have demonstrated high conversion efficiency, they were not sufficiently stable plagued by their low reproducibility
and the hysteresis in the current-voltage curves depending on the direction of the voltage sweeps.
For this reason, the semiconducting properties of perovskites had not been identified. Researchers successfully created reproducible and stable perovskite solar cells as follows;
They proposed an equivalent circuit model that explains the semiconducting properties of perovskites based on analysis of the internal resistance of perovskite solar cells.
This model indicated the existence of a charge transport process derived from an impurity level between the conduction
and valence bands in the perovskite layer. Due to this transport process, the efficiency of perovskite solar cells may be suppressed to some extent.
In future studies, researchers will investigate into the cause of the impurity level and its influence on solar cells.
In addition, they intend to remove the impurity level and improve the efficiency of the solar cells,
thereby contributing to energy and environmental conservation. This study was conducted at GREEN as a part of the MEXT-commissioned project titled"Development of environmental technology using nanotechnology."
"Arra a
#Psychology researchers report a major discovery of harmony amid chaos The researchers say the study demonstrates that inherent delays in the nervous system may play a constructive role in enabling individuals to anticipate the movement of others.
Human behavior, explain the researchers, can be highly unpredictable in how humans react or move.
It's not always a clear, stable pattern. The study aimed to explore how one person is able to coordinate with the movements of another person
when the movements are unpredictable and chaotic. For example, such chaotic movement can occur between athletes coordinating with each other on a team
or between people working in tandem on chores like loading a dishwasher, or navigating a room packed with people."
"In addition to the fact that we know we have these intrinsic delays in our nervous system, our experiment sort of built on
and exaggerated those delays, and demonstrated how they can increase one's ability to anticipate the chaotic movements of another co-actor,
A leader and follower controlled dots on a screen, using hand-held motion tracking sensors. The leader was taught to produce chaotic and unpredictable movements,
and when their dot moved on the screen the researchers found that, contrary to traditional thinking that a feedback delay would be a hindrance to coordination,
because it could potentially change the way we understand how the nervous system works and how perpetual-motor delays play a role in human behavior,
"says Washburn's co-researcher and advisor, Michael J. Richardson, an associate professor of psychology. The researchers say the discovery could also impact future research into areas such as the development of robotics,
"These findings could aid in the development of any artificial system that works with a human,
#Crossing a critical threshold in optical communications Researchers from Lehigh University, Japan and Canada have advanced a step closer to the dream of all-optical data transmission by building
and demonstrating what they call the"world's first fully functioning single crystal waveguide in glass."
the group said it had employed ultrafast femtosecond lasers to produce a three-dimensional single crystal capable of guiding light waves through glass with little loss of light.
The article, published May 19, is titled"Direct laser-writing of ferroelectric single-crystal waveguide architectures in glass for 3d integrated optics."
"The article's lead author, Adam Stone, received his Ph d. in materials science and engineering from Lehigh in 2014.
The coauthors are Himanshu Jain, professor of materials science and engineering, and Volkmar Dierolf, professor of physics, both at Lehigh,
and researchers from Kyoto University in Japan and Polytechnique Montreal in Canada. The group says its achievement will boost ongoing efforts to develop photonic integrated circuits (PICS) that are smaller, cheaper, more energy-efficient and more reliable than current networks that use discrete optoelectronic components--waveguides, splitters, modulators, filters
, amplifiers--to transport optical signals.""A major trend in optics,"the researchers write, "has been a drive toward...
replacing systems of large discrete components that provide individual functions with compact and multifunctional PICS,
in much the same way that integration of electronics has driven the impressive advances of modern computer systems."
"To make this transition, however, improved methods of fabricating 3d PICS are needed, the researchers say."
to prevent light from scattering as it is being transmitted and, second, to transmit and manipulate light signals fast enough to handle increasingly large quantities of data.
Glass, an amorphous material with an inherently disordered atomic structure, cannot meet these challenges, the researchers say.
Crystals, with their highly ordered specific lattice structure, have the requisite optical qualities.""Amorphous waveguides fundamentally lack second-order optical nonlinearity due to their isotropically disordered atomic structure,
"the researchers write, "so certain photonic applications that not only transport but also manipulate photonic signals...require crystalline substrates with second-order nonlinear optical response."
"The ability to pattern nonlinear optical crystals in glass is therefore essential for 3d laser-fabrication of PICS to achieve its full potential."
"To pattern crystals in glass, the Lehigh-led group employed femtosecond lasers, whose speed and precision make them useful for cataract and other eye surgeries.
A femtosecond is one-quadrillionth, or 10-15 of a second. Pulses emitted by femtosecond lasers last between a few femtoseconds and hundreds of femtoseconds.
Scientists have been attempting for years to make crystals in glass in order to prevent light from being scattered as light signals are transmitted,
The task is complicated by the"mutually exclusive"nature of the properties of crystal and glass. Glass turns to crystal when it is heated
says Jain, but it is critical to control the transition.""The question is, how long will this process take
and will we get one crystal or many. We want a single crystal; light cannot travel through multiple crystals.
And we need the crystal to be in the right shape and form.""After conducting experiments at Lehigh and at Kyoto University and Polytechnique Montreal,
the group built a single crystal in glass, demonstrated its waveguiding capabilities and quantified its transmission efficiency.
The glass and crystal both were composed of lanthanum borogermanate (Labgeo5), a ferroelectric material.""We achieved quality,
"says Dierolf,"by guiding light from one end of the crystal to the other with very little loss of light."
"We have made the equivalent of a wire to guide the light. With our crystal, it is possible to do this in 3d
so that the wire--the light--can curve and bend as it is transmitted. This gives us the potential of putting different components on different layers of glass."
"The fact that the demonstration was achieved using ferroelectric materials is another plus, says Dierolf.""Ferroelectric crystals have demonstrated an electrical-optical effect that can be exploited for switching
and for steering light from one place to another as a supermarket scanner does. Ferroelectric crystals can also transform light from one frequency to another.
This makes it possible to send light through different channels.""""Other groups have made crystal in glass
but were not able to demonstrate quality, "says Jain.""With the quality of our crystal, we have crossed the threshold for the idea to be useful.
As a result, we are now exploring the development of novel devices for optical communication in collaboration with a major company."
"The femtosecond laser provides several critical advantages, say Dierolf and Jain. The high intensity of the laser pulse enables nonlinear optical absorption.
or almost melt, until it is transformed into a crystal.""The unique focus of the femtosecond laser also makes it possible to"write"the crystal inside the glass and not on its surface."
Subsequently, NSF has provided funding for the work at Lehigh and, through Lehigh's International Materials Institute for New Functionalities in Glass, for the international collaborations as well.
#Ultrafast heat conduction can manipulate nanoscale magnets"In our study, we make use of the fact that a heat current passing through a magnetic material creates a separation of electron spins.
This process creates a current of magnetic dipoles that we use to manipulate the orientation of a second magnetic layer,
"said David Cahill, a Donald B. Willett Professor of Engineering and head of the Department of Materials science and engineering at Illinois."The physics of separating spins with heat currents is related to the operation of thermocouples and the thermoelectric generators that power deep space
probes. In those thermoelectric devices a heat current causes a separation of electrical charges. That separation of electrical charge can then be used to measure a temperature
or provide electrical power.""""We use the spin current created by ultrafast heat conduction to generate spin transfer torque.
and enables the manipulation of nanomagnets with spin currents rather than magnetic fields, "explained Gyung-Min Choi,
who recently completed his Phd in materials science and engineering at Illinois."Spin transfer torque has often been realized by passing electrical currents through magnetic layers.
and heat at the nanoscale, addressing the fundamental limits of ultrafast spintronic devices for data storage and information processing.
In addition to Choi and Cahill--whose work was supported by the Army Research Office MURI program--co-authors of the paper include Byoung-Chul Min, Center for Spintronics Research, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul;
and Kyung-Jin Lee, Department of Materials science and engineering and KU-KIST Graduate school of Converging Science and Technology, Korea University, Seoul l
#Disrupting tumor cell'microenvironment'suggests a new way to treat a prevalent childhood leukemia Researchers at NYU Langone Medical center
and its Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center are reporting a potentially important discovery in the battle against one of the most devastating forms of leukemia that accounts for as many as one in five children with a particularly aggressive form of the disease
or T-ALL, by stalling the action of a specific protein receptor found in abundance on the surface of T cells at the core of T-ALL IN experiments in mice and human cells,
and attracts blood cells to the bone marrow--halted disease progression in bone marrow and spleen tissue within two weeks.
The experiments also left white blood cells cancer free for more than 30 weeks in live mice. Further, the research team found that in mice bred to develop T-ALL
Researchers say their study results for the first time"clearly establish CXCR4 signaling as essential for T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia cell growth and disease progression.""
""Our experiments showed that blocking CXCR4 decimated leukemia cells, "says co-senior study investigator and NYU Langone cell biologist Susan Schwab, Phd.
Schwab, an assistant professor at NYU Langone and its Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, says similar laboratory test plans are underway for more potent CXCR4 antagonists, most likely in combination with established chemotherapy regimens.
She notes that anti-CXCR4 drugs are already in preliminary testing for treating certain forms of myeloid leukemia,
Schwab says T-ALL is"a particularly devastating cancer "because there are not many treatment options.
showed that only 23 percent of patients lived longer than five years after failing to sustain remission with standard chemotherapy drugs.
Co-senior study investigator and cancer biologist Iannis Aifantis, Phd, says the study offers the first evidence that"drugs targeting
and disrupting leukemia cells'microenvironment--or what goes on around them--could prove effective against the disease."
"Aifantis, the chair of the Department of Pathology at NYU Langone and a member of its Perlmutter Cancer Center,
and an early career scientist at the Howard hughes medical institute, says experiments in his laboratory had shown that leukemia-initiating cells concentrate in the bone marrow near CXCL12-producing blood vessels.
This finding prompted a collaborative effort to investigate expression and function of CXCR4 because it binds to CXCL12,
which in turn led to the researchers determining the vital role played by CXCR4-CXCL12 molecular signaling in disease growth.
Disease progression in the bone marrow stalled within three weeks and tumors were smaller than in similar mice that retained CXCL12 production.
Deletion of the CXCR4 gene led to sustained T-ALL remission within a month in similar mice,
as well as movement of the cancerous blood cells away from the bone marrow. Subsequent transplant of millions of human T-ALL cells into normal mice that were treated then with an anti-CXCR4 drug induced remission within two weeks,
with diseased spleen and bone marrow tissue nearly returning to normal l
#Researchers boost body's inflammation-reduction mechanism to combat obesity-fueled disease"This is a new way of reducing inflammation
and protecting organs, using a compound that's already produced by the body, "said co-senior author Kumar Sharma, MD, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Renal Translational Medicine at UC San diego School of medicine."
"Essentially, we're boosting the body's natural response for reducing inflammation and showing the benefit in obesity-driven diseases."
"Catherine Godson, Phd, co-senior author and director of the UCD Diabetes Complications Research Centre in UCD School of medicine and UCD Conway Institute, said the study's findings demonstrate the value
and potential impact of fundamental research.""Drawing on collaborative expertise in synthetic chemistry, molecular biology and translational medicine, the team has produced findings with significant potential to reduce inflammation, a critical driver of the devastating consequences of obesity-related diseases,
"she said. In the body, inflammation is normally a natural healing response to infection or injury."
"You get a recruitment of white blood cells that fight off the infection or work to heal the injury,
"explained first author Emma Borgeson, Phd, a postdoctoral fellow at UC San diego and UCD.""It is a good thing.
It's only when the inflammation becomes chronic that it can cause disease to occur.""Borgeson said that a family of lipids,
known as specialized pro-resolving mediators (SPMS), are the body's natural shut off mechanism for inflammation."
Working with an obese mouse model, the researchers gave the mice a synthetic version of lipoxin A4 to boost the amount of the natural substance already in their systems.
The results showed significant disease improvement, primarily by affecting fat tissue.""The mice had been on a high-fat diet for three months
We found that it significantly reduced inflammation in the fat tissues and improved kidney and liver disease.
who has started already this work as a guest researcher at the Sahlgrenska Academy Hospital in Sweden."
"Our ultimate hope would be to use these findings to create a lipoxin-based drug for obese people to help protect them against associated illnesses, such as kidney and liver disease,
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