Publications by authors named "Nicholas Heredia"

Article Synopsis
  • Using aerosol tracers helps assess the risk of airborne infections in building designs, particularly against viruses like SARS-CoV-2 and influenza.
  • A method is proposed to enhance a quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) model by using synthetic DNA tracer concentrations to understand aerosol emissions from coughing or sneezing.
  • The tracer-scaled QMRA model evaluates various risk reduction strategies, such as ventilation and air filtration, providing a simple way to assess the effectiveness of interventions in reducing infection risks in indoor spaces.
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Digital PCR is a valuable tool to quantify next-generation sequencing (NGS) libraries precisely and accurately. Accurately quantifying NGS libraries enable accurate loading of the libraries on to the sequencer and thus improve sequencing performance by reducing under and overloading error. Accurate quantification also benefits users by enabling uniform loading of indexed/barcoded libraries which in turn greatly improves sequencing uniformity of the indexed/barcoded samples.

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Unlabelled: The human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2, also known as erbB2) gene is involved in signal transduction for cell growth and differentiation. It is a cell surface receptor tyrosine kinase and a proto-oncogene. Overexpression of HER2 is of clinical relevance in breast cancer due to its prognostic value correlating elevated expression with worsening clinical outcome.

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Digital PCR enables the absolute quantitation of nucleic acids in a sample. The lack of scalable and practical technologies for digital PCR implementation has hampered the widespread adoption of this inherently powerful technique. Here we describe a high-throughput droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) system that enables processing of ~2 million PCR reactions using conventional TaqMan assays with a 96-well plate workflow.

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We present a double transposition technique that inserts two different transposons into target DNA to act as priming sites for amplifying the region between the two transposons for sequencing applications. Unlike some current sequencing approaches, the genome of the unknown target remains intact in this method. The transposition reaction, DNA repair, and subsequent sequencing were performed entirely in vitro, without the need for transformation into bacteria, and resulted in sequence homology with the plasmid DNA target.

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Bacterial translation initiation factor 3 (IF3) is involved in the fidelity of translation initiation at several levels, including start-codon discrimination, mRNA translation, and initiator-tRNA selection. The IF3 C-terminal domain (CTD) is required for binding to the 30S ribosomal subunit. N-terminal domain (NTD) function is less certain, but likely contributes to initiation fidelity.

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