Protein Adsorption on Solid Surfaces: Data Mining, Database, Molecular Surface-Derived Properties, and Semiempirical Relationships.

Protein adsorption on solid surfaces is a process relevant to biological, medical, industrial, and environmental applications. Despite this wide interest and advancement in measurement techniques, the complexity of protein adsorption has frustrated its accurate prediction. To address this challenge, here, data regarding protein adsorption reported in the last four decades was collected, checked for completeness and correctness, organized, and archived in an upgraded, freely accessible Biomolecular Adsorption Database, which is equivalent to a large-scale, ad hoc, crowd-sourced multifactorial experiment.

Coordinated nasal mucosa-mediated immunity accelerates recovery from COVID-19.

Introduction: Understanding the interplay of immune mediators in relation to clinical outcomes during acute infection has the potential to highlight immune networks critical to symptom recovery. The objective of the present study was to elucidate the immune networks critical to early symptom resolution following severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection.

Methods: In a community-based randomised clinical trial comparing inhaled budesonide against usual care in 139 participants with early onset SARS-CoV-2 (the STOIC study; clinicaltrials.

Biosensing using antibody-modulated motility of actin filaments on myosin-coated surfaces.

Motor proteins, such as myosin and kinesin, are biological molecular motors involved in force generation and intracellular transport within living cells. The characteristics of molecular motors, i.e.

Spatially Addressable Multiplex Biodetection by Calibrated Micro/Nanostructured Surfaces.

A challenge of any biosensing technology is the detection of very low concentrations of analytes. The fluorescence interference contrast (FLIC) technique improves the fluorescence-based sensitivity by selectively amplifying, or suppressing, the emission of a fluorophore-labeled biomolecule immobilized on a transparent layer placed on top of a mirror basal surface. The standing wave of the reflected emission light means that the height of the transparent layer operates as a surface-embedded optical filter for the fluorescence signal.

Epigenome erosion and SOX10 drive neural crest phenotypic mimicry in triple-negative breast cancer.

Intratumoral heterogeneity is caused by genomic instability and phenotypic plasticity, but how these features co-evolve remains unclear. SOX10 is a neural crest stem cell (NCSC) specifier and candidate mediator of phenotypic plasticity in cancer. We investigated its relevance in breast cancer by immunophenotyping 21 normal breast and 1860 tumour samples.

Early Th2 inflammation in the upper respiratory mucosa as a predictor of severe COVID-19 and modulation by early treatment with inhaled corticosteroids: a mechanistic analysis.

Background: Community-based clinical trials of the inhaled corticosteroid budesonide in early COVID-19 have shown improved patient outcomes. We aimed to understand the inflammatory mechanism of budesonide in the treatment of early COVID-19.

Methods: The STOIC trial was a randomised, open label, parallel group, phase 2 clinical intervention trial where patients were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive usual care (as needed antipyretics were only available treatment) or inhaled budesonide at a dose of 800 μg twice a day plus usual care.

Hydrophobic Recovery of PDMS Surfaces in Contact with Hydrophilic Entities: Relevance to Biomedical Devices.

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a silicone elastomer, is increasingly being used in health and biomedical fields due to its excellent optical and mechanical properties. Its biocompatibility and resistance to biodegradation led to various applications (e.g.

Effects of defective motors on the active transport in biosensors powered by biomolecular motors.

Motor proteins, such as myosin and kinesin, are biological molecular motors involved in force generation and intracellular transport in living cells. They were proposed to drive molecular shuttles for the active transport of analytes, thus significantly accelerating the sensing process of biosensors. Integrating motor proteins into biosensors requires their immobilisation on the operating surfaces.

Patterns of bacterial motility in microfluidics-confining environments.

Understanding the motility behavior of bacteria in confining microenvironments, in which they search for available physical space and move in response to stimuli, is important for environmental, food industry, and biomedical applications. We studied the motility of five bacterial species with various sizes and flagellar architectures (, , , , and ) in microfluidic environments presenting various levels of confinement and geometrical complexity, in the absence of external flow and concentration gradients. When the confinement is moderate, such as in quasi-open spaces with only one limiting wall, and in wide channels, the motility behavior of bacteria with complex flagellar architectures approximately follows the hydrodynamics-based predictions developed for simple monotrichous bacteria.

Inhaled budesonide in the treatment of early COVID-19 (STOIC): a phase 2, open-label, randomised controlled trial.

Background: Multiple early reports of patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 showed that patients with chronic respiratory disease were significantly under-represented in these cohorts. We hypothesised that the widespread use of inhaled glucocorticoids among these patients was responsible for this finding, and tested if inhaled glucocorticoids would be an effective treatment for early COVID-19.

Methods: We performed an open-label, parallel-group, phase 2, randomised controlled trial (Steroids in COVID-19; STOIC) of inhaled budesonide, compared with usual care, in adults within 7 days of the onset of mild COVID-19 symptoms.

Effect of physicochemical parameters on the stability and activity of garlic alliinase and its use for in-situ allicin synthesis.

Garlic is a well-known example of natural self-defence system consisting of an inactive substrate (alliin) and enzyme (alliinase) which, when combined, produce highly antimicrobial allicin. Increase of alliinase stability and its activity are of paramount importance in various applications relying on its use for in-situ synthesis of allicin or its analogues, e.g.

Infection, inflammation and intervention: mechanistic modelling of epithelial cells in COVID-19.

While the pathological mechanisms in COVID-19 illness are still poorly understood, it is increasingly clear that high levels of pro-inflammatory mediators play a major role in clinical deterioration in patients with severe disease. Current evidence points to a hyperinflammatory state as the driver of respiratory compromise in severe COVID-19 disease, with a clinical trajectory resembling acute respiratory distress syndrome, but how this 'runaway train' inflammatory response emerges and is maintained is not known. Here, we present the first mathematical model of lung hyperinflammation due to SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Lensless, reflection-based dark-field microscopy (RDFM) on a CMOS chip.

We present for the first time a lens-free, oblique illumination imaging platform for on-sensor dark- field microscopy and shadow-based 3D object measurements. It consists of an LED point source that illuminates a 5-megapixel, 1.4 µm pixel size, back-illuminated CMOS sensor at angles between 0° and 90°.

Mathematical Models of Cancer Cell Plasticity.

Quantitative modelling is increasingly important in cancer research, helping to integrate myriad diverse experimental data into coherent pictures of the disease and able to discriminate between competing hypotheses or suggest specific experimental lines of enquiry and new approaches to therapy. Here, we review a diverse set of mathematical models of cancer cell plasticity (a process in which, through genetic and epigenetic changes, cancer cells survive in hostile environments and migrate to more favourable environments, respectively), tumour growth, and invasion. Quantitative models can help to elucidate the complex biological mechanisms of cancer cell plasticity.

Simple adaptive mobile phone screen illumination for dual phone differential phase contrast (DPDPC) microscopy.

Phase contrast imaging is widely employed in the physical, biological, and medical sciences. However, typical implementations involve complex imaging systems that amount to in-line interferometers. We adapt differential phase contrast (DPC) to a dual-phone illumination-imaging system to obtain phase contrast images on a portable mobile phone platform.

Correction to 'Something has to give: scaling combinatorial computing by biological agents exploring physical networks encoding NP-complete problems'.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1098/rsfs.2018.

Intracellular mechanisms of fungal space searching in microenvironments.

Filamentous fungi that colonize microenvironments, such as animal or plant tissue or soil, must find optimal paths through their habitat, but the biological basis for negotiating growth in constrained environments is unknown. We used time-lapse live-cell imaging of in microfluidic environments to show how constraining geometries determine the intracellular processes responsible for fungal growth. We found that, if a hypha made contact with obstacles at acute angles, the Spitzenkörper (an assembly of vesicles) moved from the center of the apical dome closer to the obstacle, thus functioning as an internal gyroscope, which preserved the information regarding the initial growth direction.

Efficiency of the flagellar propulsion of Escherichia coli in confined microfluidic geometries.

Bacterial movement in confined spaces is routinely encountered either in a natural environment or in artificial structures. Consequently, the ability to understand and predict the behavior of motile bacterial cells in confined geometries is essential to many applications, spanning from the more classical, such as the management complex microbial networks involved in diseases, biomanufacturing, mining, and environment, to the more recent, such as single cell DNA sequencing and computation with biological agents. Fortunately, the development of this understanding can be helped by the decades-long advances in semiconductor microfabrication, which allow the design and the construction of complex confining structures used as test beds for the study of bacterial motility.

Dual-phone illumination-imaging system for high resolution and large field of view multi-modal microscopy.

In this paper we present for the first time a system comprised of two mobile phones, one for illumination and the other for microscopy, as a portable, user-friendly, and cost-effective microscopy platform for a wide range of applications. Versatile and adaptive illumination is made with a Retina display of an Apple mobile phone device. The phone screen is used to project various illumination patterns onto the specimen being imaged, each corresponding to a different illumination mode, such as bright-field, dark-field, point illumination, Rheinberg illumination, and fluorescence microscopy.

Something has to give: scaling combinatorial computing by biological agents exploring physical networks encoding NP-complete problems.

On-chip network-based computation, using biological agents, is a new hardware-embedded approach which attempts to find solutions to combinatorial problems, in principle, in a shorter time than the fast, but sequential electronic computers. This analytical review starts by describing the underlying mathematical principles, presents several types of combinatorial (including NP-complete) problems and shows current implementations of proof of principle developments. Taking the subset sum problem as example for in-depth analysis, the review presents various options of computing agents, and compares several possible operation 'run modes' of network-based computer systems.

Protein microarray spots are modulated by patterning method, surface chemistry and processing conditions.

The uniformity of the protein patterns, their shape, and the contrast between the fluorescence signal of the pattern and the background, critically modulate the quantitative accuracy of the microarray-derived data. While significant research focused of the identification of the factors that impact the protein microarray patterns, these studies usually have focused on the optimization of one set of these factors, e.g.