Point-of-care diagnostics: recent developments in a pandemic age.

In this review, we provide an overview of developments in point-of-care (POC) diagnostics during the COVID-19 pandemic. We review these advances within the framework of a holistic POC ecosystem, focusing on points of interest - both technological and non-technological - to POC researchers and test developers. Technologically, we review design choices in assay chemistry, microfluidics, and instrumentation towards nucleic acid and protein detection for severe acute respiratory coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and away from the lab bench, developments that supported the unprecedented rapid development, scale up, and deployment of POC devices.

Spatiotemporal Coding of Individual Chemicals by the Gustatory System.

Unlabelled: Four of the five major sensory systems (vision, olfaction, somatosensation, and audition) are thought to use different but partially overlapping sets of neurons to form unique representations of vast numbers of stimuli. The only exception is gustation, which is thought to represent only small numbers of basic taste categories. However, using new methods for delivering tastant chemicals and making electrophysiological recordings from the tractable gustatory system of the moth Manduca sexta, we found chemical-specific information is as follows: (1) initially encoded in the population of gustatory receptor neurons as broadly distributed spatiotemporal patterns of activity; (2) dramatically integrated and temporally transformed as it propagates to monosynaptically connected second-order neurons; and (3) observed in tastant-specific behavior.