Soil Protists Can Actively Redistribute Beneficial Bacteria along Medicago truncatula Roots.

The rhizosphere is the region of soil directly influenced by plant roots. The microbial community in the rhizosphere includes fungi, protists, and bacteria: all play significant roles in plant health. The beneficial bacterium Sinorhizobium meliloti infects growing root hairs on nitrogen-starved leguminous plants.

Shape Fidelity of 3D-Bioprinted Biodegradable Patches.

There is high demand in the medical field for rapid fabrication of biodegradable patches at low cost and high throughput for various instant applications, such as wound healing. Bioprinting is a promising technology, which makes it possible to fabricate custom biodegradable patches. However, several challenges with the physical and chemical fidelity of bioprinted patches must be solved to increase the performance of patches.

Red blood cell classification in lensless single random phase encoding using convolutional neural networks.

Rapid cell identification is achieved in a compact and field-portable system employing single random phase encoding to record opto-biological signatures of living biological cells of interest. The lensless, 3D-printed system uses a diffuser to encode the complex amplitude of the sample, then the encoded signal is recorded by a CMOS image sensor for classification. Removal of lenses in this 3D sensing system removes restrictions on the field of view, numerical aperture, and depth of field normally imposed by objective lenses in comparable microscopy systems to enable robust 3D capture of biological volumes.

Enhancing Activity and Reducing Cost for Electrochemical Reduction of CO by Supporting Palladium on Metal Carbides.

Electrochemical CO reduction reaction (CO RR) with renewable electricity is a potentially sustainable method to reduce CO emissions. Palladium supported on cost-effective transition-metal carbides (TMCs) are studied to reduce the Pd usage and tune the activity and selectivity of the CO RR to produce synthesis gas, using a combined approach of studying thin films and practical powder catalysts, in situ characterization, and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Notably, Pd/TaC exhibits higher CO RR activity, stability and CO Faradaic efficiency than those of commercial Pd/C while significantly reducing the Pd loading.