Machine learning reveals mesenchymal breast carcinoma cell adaptation in response to matrix stiffness.

Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and its reverse process, mesenchymal-epithelial transition (MET), are believed to play key roles in facilitating the metastatic cascade. Metastatic lesions often exhibit a similar epithelial-like state to that of the primary tumour, in particular, by forming carcinoma cell clusters via E-cadherin-mediated junctional complexes. However, the factors enabling mesenchymal-like micrometastatic cells to resume growth and reacquire an epithelial phenotype in the target organ microenvironment remain elusive.

Tracing upconversion nanoparticle penetration in human skin.

Due to their unique optical properties upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) provide exceptionally high contrast for imaging of true nanoparticle distribution in excised human skin. It makes possible to show penetration of solid nanoparticles in skin treated with chemical enhancers. We demonstrated tracing upconversion nanoparticles in excised human skin by means of optical microscopy at the discrete particle level sensitivity to obtain their penetration profiles, which was validated by laser-ablation inductively-coupled-plasma mass-spectrometry.

Incoherent wavefront reconstruction by a retroemission device containing a thin fluorescent film: theory.

A retroemission device (REM) is an incoherent holographic device that represents a lenslet array situated on a substrate containing fluorescent material. Each lenslet focuses each wavelet of an optical wavefront incident on the REM device into a diffraction-limited volume (voxel) in the fluorescent material, so that the voxel coordinates encode the angle of incidence and curvature of the wavelet. The back-propagating fraction of the excited fluorescence is collected by the lenslet and quasi-collimated into a back-propagating wavelet.