Policy-Related Gains in Urban Air Quality May Be Offset by Increased Emissions in a Warming Climate.

Air quality policies have made substantial gains by reducing pollutant emissions from the transportation sector. In March 2020, New York City's activities were severely curtailed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in 60-90% reductions in human activity. We continuously measured major volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during January-April 2020 and 2021 in Manhattan.

Ammonium-adduct chemical ionization to investigate anthropogenic oxygenated gas-phase organic compounds in urban air.

Volatile chemical products (VCPs) and other non-combustion-related sources have become important for urban air quality, and bottom-up calculations report emissions of a variety of functionalized compounds that remain understudied and uncertain in emissions estimates. Using a new instrumental configuration, we present online measurements of oxygenated organic compounds in a U.S.

Making waves: Uses of real-time, hyperlocal flood sensor data for emergency management, resiliency planning, and flood impact mitigation.

Flooding is expected to increase due to intensification of extreme precipitation events, sea-level rise, and urbanization. Low-cost water level sensors have the ability to fill a critical data gap on the presence, depth, and duration of street-level floods by measuring flood profiles (i.e.

DNA-enabled rational design of fluorescence-Raman bimodal nanoprobes for cancer imaging and therapy.

Recently, surface-enhanced Raman scattering nanoprobes have shown tremendous potential in oncological imaging owing to the high sensitivity and specificity of their fingerprint-like spectra. As current Raman scanners rely on a slow, point-by-point spectrum acquisition, there is an unmet need for faster imaging to cover a clinically relevant area in real-time. Herein, we report the rational design and optimization of fluorescence-Raman bimodal nanoparticles (FRNPs) that synergistically combine the specificity of Raman spectroscopy with the versatility and speed of fluorescence imaging.

Detection of Premalignant Gastrointestinal Lesions Using Surface-Enhanced Resonance Raman Scattering-Nanoparticle Endoscopy.

Cancers of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract are among the most frequent and most lethal cancers worldwide. An important reason for this high mortality is that early disease is typically asymptomatic, and patients often present with advanced, incurable disease. Even in high-risk patients who routinely undergo endoscopic screening, lesions can be missed due to their small size or subtle appearance.

Blockade of surface-bound TGF-β on regulatory T cells abrogates suppression of effector T cell function in the tumor microenvironment.

Regulatory T cells (T) suppress antitumor immunity by inhibiting the killing of tumor cells by antigen-specific CD8 T cells. To better understand the mechanisms involved, we used ex vivo three-dimensional collagen-fibrin gel cultures of dissociated B16 melanoma tumors. This system recapitulated the in vivo suppression of antimelanoma immunity, rendering the dissociated tumor cells resistant to killing by cocultured activated, antigen-specific T cells.

Polarization-controlled TIRFM with focal drift and spatial field intensity correction.

Total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (TIRFM) is becoming an increasingly common methodology to narrow the illumination excitation thickness to study cellular process such as exocytosis, endocytosis, and membrane dynamics. It is also frequently used as a method to improve signal/noise in other techniques such as in vitro single-molecule imaging, stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy/photoactivated localization microscopy imaging, and fluorescence resonance energy transfer imaging. The unique illumination geometry of TIRFM also enables a distinct method to create an excitation field for selectively exciting fluorophores that are aligned either parallel or perpendicular to the optical axis.

Confocal microscopy with strip mosaicing for rapid imaging over large areas of excised tissue.

Confocal mosaicing microscopy is a developing technology platform for imaging tumor margins directly in freshly excised tissue, without the processing required for conventional pathology. Previously, mosaicing on 12-×-12  mm² of excised skin tissue from Mohs surgery and detection of basal cell carcinoma margins was demonstrated in 9 min. Last year, we reported the feasibility of a faster approach called "strip mosaicing," which was demonstrated on a 10-×-10  mm² of tissue in 3 min.

Detection of intra-tumor self antigen recognition during melanoma tumor progression in mice using advanced multimode confocal/two photon microscope.

Determining how tumor immunity is regulated requires understanding the extent to which the anti-tumor immune response "functions" in vivo without therapeutic intervention. To better understand this question, we developed advanced multimodal reflectance confocal/two photon fluorescence intra-vital imaging techniques to use in combination with traditional ex vivo analysis of tumor specific T cells. By transferring small numbers of melanoma-specific CD8+ T cells (Pmel-1), in an attempt to mimic physiologic conditions, we found that B16 tumor growth alone was sufficient to induce naive Pmel-1 T cell proliferation and acquisition of effector phenotype.

Rapid confocal imaging of large areas of excised tissue with strip mosaicing.

Imaging large areas of tissue rapidly and with high resolution may enable rapid pathology at the bedside. The limited field of view of high-resolution microscopes requires the merging of multiple images that are taken sequentially to cover a large area. This merging or mosaicing of images requires long acquisition and processing times, and produces artifacts.

In vivo microcartography and subcellular imaging of tumor angiogenesis: a novel platform for translational angiogenesis research.

Purpose: To eliminate the variable of tumor heterogeneity from a novel in vivo model of tumor angiogenesis.

Experimental Design: We developed a method to navigate tumor neovasculature in a living tissue microenvironment, enabling relocation of a cell- or microregion-of-interest, for serial in vivo imaging. Orthotopic melanoma was grown, in immunocompetent Tie2GFP mice.

Automated serum peptide profiling.

Blood is a convenient source of biomarkers. Readily obtainable, it immerses most tissues in the body and is therefore likely to contain cell-derived proteins and peptides that may provide information about various biological processes. Serum proteome and peptidome profiling--using mass spectrometry (MS), for example--may thus show a functional correlate of biological events and disorders.

Dual mode reflectance and fluorescence confocal laser scanning microscopy for in vivo imaging melanoma progression in murine skin.

A system was designed and developed for simultaneous fluorescence and reflectance contrast in vivo confocal imaging of murine skin using 488 nm (fluorescence mode) and 830 nm (reflectance mode) laser light sources. B16 melanoma cells and B16-enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) cells were inoculated intradermally into transgenic C57BL/6-TgN (ACTbEGFP) 10sb and non-transgenic C57BL/6 mice, respectively. The inoculation sites were imaged sequentially over a 20 d period.

Correcting common errors in identifying cancer-specific serum peptide signatures.

"Molecular signatures" are the qualitative and quantitative patterns of groups of biomolecules (e.g., mRNA, proteins, peptides, or metabolites) in a cell, tissue, biological fluid, or an entire organism.

Video-rate nonlinear microscopy of neuronal membrane dynamics with genetically encoded probes.

Biological membranes decorated with suitable contrast agents give rise to nonlinear optical signals such as two-photon fluorescence and harmonic up-conversion when illuminated with ultra-short, high-intensity pulses of infrared laser light. Microscopic images based on these nonlinear contrasts were acquired at video or higher frame rates by scanning a focused illuminating spot rapidly across neural tissues. The scan engine relied on an acousto-optic deflector (AOD) to produce a fast horizontal raster and on corrective prisms to offset the AOD-induced dispersion of the ultra-short excitation light pulses in space and time.