Psychometric properties of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale for Students (UWES-S) in the Taiwanese context.

Academic engagement in recent years has become the focus of determining student learning and achievement. However,despite this growing awareness that has revolutionized academic policies and educational approaches, literature on engagement in the academic context is still in its infancy. This study seeks to remedy this through the confirmation of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale for Students' (UWES-S) promising psychometric properties and by providing empirical evidence on the relationship between academic engagement, personality traits, and social media addiction, a determinant that has yet to be explored.

Using enhanced number and brightness to measure protein oligomerization dynamics in live cells.

Protein dimerization and oligomerization are essential to most cellular functions, yet measurement of the size of these oligomers in live cells, especially when their size changes over time and space, remains a challenge. A commonly used approach for studying protein aggregates in cells is number and brightness (N&B), a fluorescence microscopy method that is capable of measuring the apparent average number of molecules and their oligomerization (brightness) in each pixel from a series of fluorescence microscopy images. We have recently expanded this approach in order to allow resampling of the raw data to resolve the statistical weighting of coexisting species within each pixel.

Eph-ephrin signaling modulated by polymerization and condensation of receptors.

Eph receptor signaling plays key roles in vertebrate tissue boundary formation, axonal pathfinding, and stem cell regeneration by steering cells to positions defined by its ligand ephrin. Some of the key events in Eph-ephrin signaling are understood: ephrin binding triggers the clustering of the Eph receptor, fostering transphosphorylation and signal transduction into the cell. However, a quantitative and mechanistic understanding of how the signal is processed by the recipient cell into precise and proportional responses is largely lacking.

Hyperspectral phasor analysis enables multiplexed 5D in vivo imaging.

Time-lapse imaging of multiple labels is challenging for biological imaging as noise, photobleaching and phototoxicity compromise signal quality, while throughput can be limited by processing time. Here, we report software called Hyper-Spectral Phasors (HySP) for denoising and unmixing multiple spectrally overlapping fluorophores in a low signal-to-noise regime with fast analysis. We show that HySP enables unmixing of seven signals in time-lapse imaging of living zebrafish embryos.

Single cell dynamic phenotyping.

Live cell imaging has improved our ability to measure phenotypic heterogeneity. However, bottlenecks in imaging and image processing often make it difficult to differentiate interesting biological behavior from technical artifact. Thus there is a need for new methods that improve data quality without sacrificing throughput.

Intracellular kinetics of the androgen receptor shown by multimodal Image Correlation Spectroscopy (mICS).

The androgen receptor (AR) pathway plays a central role in prostate cancer (PCa) growth and progression and is a validated therapeutic target. In response to ligand binding AR translocates to the nucleus, though the molecular mechanism is not well understood. We therefore developed multimodal Image Correlation Spectroscopy (mICS) to measure anisotropic molecular motion across a live cell.

Measuring actin flow in 3D cell protrusions.

Actin dynamics is important in determining cell shape, tension, and migration. Methods such as fluorescent speckle microscopy and spatial temporal image correlation spectroscopy have been used to capture high-resolution actin turnover dynamics within cells in two dimensions. However, these methods are not directly applicable in 3D due to lower resolution and poor contrast.

Cell matrix remodeling ability shown by image spatial correlation.

Extracellular matrix (ECM) remodeling is a critical step of many biological and pathological processes. However, most of the studies to date lack a quantitative method to measure ECM remodeling at a scale comparable to cell size. Here, we applied image spatial correlation to collagen second harmonic generation (SHG) images to quantitatively evaluate the degree of collagen remodeling by cells.

Axial super resolution topography of focal adhesion by confocal microscopy.

The protein organization within focal adhesions has been studied by state-of-the-art super resolution methods because of its thin structure, well below diffraction limit. However, to achieve high axial resolution, most of the current approaches rely on either sophisticated optics or diligent sample preparation, limiting their application. In this report we present a phasor-based method that can be applied to fluorescent samples to determine the precise axial position of proteins using a conventional confocal microscope.

Development of a novel cross-linking strategy for fast and accurate identification of cross-linked peptides of protein complexes.

Knowledge of elaborate structures of protein complexes is fundamental for understanding their functions and regulations. Although cross-linking coupled with mass spectrometry (MS) has been presented as a feasible strategy for structural elucidation of large multisubunit protein complexes, this method has proven challenging because of technical difficulties in unambiguous identification of cross-linked peptides and determination of cross-linked sites by MS analysis. In this work, we developed a novel cross-linking strategy using a newly designed MS-cleavable cross-linker, disuccinimidyl sulfoxide (DSSO).

A planar interdigitated ring electrode array via dielectrophoresis for uniform patterning of cells.

Uniform patterning of cells is highly desirable for most cellular studies involving cell-cell interactions but is often difficult in an in vitro environment. This paper presents the development of a collagen-coated planar interdigitated ring electrode (PIRE) array utilizing positive dielectrophoresis to pattern cells uniformly. Key features of the PIRE design include: (1) maximizing length along the edges where the localized maximum in the electric field exists; (2) making the inner gap slightly smaller than the outer gap in causing the electric field strength near the center of a PIRE being generally stronger than that near the outer edge of the same PIRE.