Versatile Protein-A Coated Photoelectric Immunosensors with a Purple-Membrane Monolayer Transducer Fabricated by Affinity-Immobilization on a Graphene-Oxide Complexed Linker and by Shear Flow.

Bacteriorhodopsin-embedded purple membranes (PM) have been demonstrated to be a sensitive photoelectric transducer for microbial detection. To efficiently prepare versatile BR-based immunosensors with protein A as antibody captures, a large, high-coverage, and uniformly oriented PM monolayer was fabricated on an electrode as an effective foundation for protein A conjugation through bis-NHS esters, by first affinity-coating biotinylated PM on an aminated surface using a complex of oxidized avidin and graphene oxide as the planar linker and then washing the coating with a shear flow. Three different polyclonal antibodies, each against , , and , respectively, were individually, effectively and readily adsorbed on the protein A coated electrodes, leading to selective and sensitive quantitative detection of their respective target cells in a single step without any labeling.

Using random forest for reliable classification and cost-sensitive learning for medical diagnosis.

Background: Most machine-learning classifiers output label predictions for new instances without indicating how reliable the predictions are. The applicability of these classifiers is limited in critical domains where incorrect predictions have serious consequences, like medical diagnosis. Further, the default assumption of equal misclassification costs is most likely violated in medical diagnosis.

Painless electroporation with a new needle-free microelectrode array to enhance transdermal drug delivery.

A microelectrode array was designed to minimize the pain sensation of electroporation for enhancing transdermal drug delivery. The influence of the size of the electrode-skin contact area and of the distance between electrodes on the pain sensation was tested on human volunteers. The pain level decreased with the dimension of electrode-skin contact area and with inter-electrode distance.

Kekulé count in capped zigzag boron-nitride nanotubes.

Hemi-B16N16 capped zigzag boron-nitride nanotube is introduced, and its Kekulé count is studied. With a bond-allocating and coding scheme, recurrence formulas are established as well as for the case of a hemi-B36N36 capped zigzag nanotube. Numerical results reveal that the Kekulé counts increase exponentially with respect to the number of layers in the nanotubes concerned.