Test-Retest Reliability of Two Computationally-Characterised Affective Bias Tasks.

Affective biases are commonly seen in disorders such as depression and anxiety, where individuals may show attention towards and preferential processing of negative or threatening stimuli. Affective biases have been shown to change with effective intervention: randomized controlled trials into these biases and the mechanisms that underpin them may allow greater understanding of how interventions can be improved and their success be maximized. For such trials to be informative, we must have reliable ways of measuring affective bias over time, so we can detect how and whether they are altered by interventions: the test-retest reliability of our measures puts an upper bound on our ability to detect any changes.

FGFR2-fusions define a clinically actionable molecular subset of pancreatic cancer.

Genomic alterations in fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) genes are present in a small number of metastatic pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas (PDAC) and may represent an emerging subgroup of patients likely to benefit from FGFR targeted therapies. Here we present four FGFR2 fusion-positive metastatic PDAC patients who exhibited durable responses or disease control to FGFR kinase inhibitors. Utilizing our custom FGFR focused cell-free DNA assay, FGFR-Dx, we serially monitored variant allele fractions of FGFR2 fusions during FGFR inhibitor treatment and observed dynamic changes correlating with clinical responses.

Analytic validation of an -focused cell-free DNA liquid biopsy assay (FGFR-Dx).

Commercial liquid biopsy assays are routinely used by oncologists to monitor disease response and resistance to therapy. Additionally, in cases where tumor tissue is not available, clinicians may rely on cell-free DNA (cfDNA) testing as a surrogate for comprehensive tumor testing. While some gene rearrangements are well detected, current commercial liquid biopsy assays exhibit low sensitivity for fibroblast growth factor receptor ( ) rearrangements.

Robust genome and cell engineering via in vitro and in situ circularized RNAs.

Circularization can improve RNA persistence, yet simple and scalable approaches to achieve this are lacking. Here we report two methods that facilitate the pursuit of circular RNAs (cRNAs): cRNAs developed via in vitro circularization using group II introns, and cRNAs developed via in-cell circularization by the ubiquitously expressed RtcB protein. We also report simple purification protocols that enable high cRNA yields (40-75%) while maintaining low immune responses.

Emittance preservation in a plasma-wakefield accelerator.

Radio-frequency particle accelerators are engines of discovery, powering high-energy physics and photon science, but are also large and expensive due to their limited accelerating fields. Plasma-wakefield accelerators (PWFAs) provide orders-of-magnitude stronger fields in the charge-density wave behind a particle bunch travelling in a plasma, promising particle accelerators of greatly reduced size and cost. However, PWFAs can easily degrade the beam quality of the bunches they accelerate.