Proximal remote sensing: an essential tool for bridging the gap between high-resolution ecosystem monitoring and global ecology.

A new proliferation of optical instruments that can be attached to towers over or within ecosystems, or 'proximal' remote sensing, enables a comprehensive characterization of terrestrial ecosystem structure, function, and fluxes of energy, water, and carbon. Proximal remote sensing can bridge the gap between individual plants, site-level eddy-covariance fluxes, and airborne and spaceborne remote sensing by providing continuous data at a high-spatiotemporal resolution. Here, we review recent advances in proximal remote sensing for improving our mechanistic understanding of plant and ecosystem processes, model development, and validation of current and upcoming satellite missions.

Investigating the Reliability of Shore Hardness in the Design of Procedural Task Trainers.

The haptic fidelity of biomimetic materials used in the design of procedural task trainers is of growing interest to the medical community. Shore hardness has been proposed as a method for assessing tissue biomechanics and replicating the results as a way to increase the fidelity of biomimetics to tissues. However, there is limited research on the reliability of human tissue measurements using Shore scales.

Covalent Inhibitors of KEAP1 with Exquisite Selectivity.

The NRF2-KEAP1 interaction is central for cytoprotection against stresses, giving it high clinical significance. Covalent modification of KEAP1 is an efficient approach, but the covalent inhibitors used in the clinic carry undesired side effects originating in their moderate selectivity. Starting with a phenotypic screen, we identified a new covalent inhibitor chemotype that was optimized to deliver a series of potent and highly selective KEAP1 binders.

Ribozyme-activated mRNA trans-ligation enables large gene delivery to treat muscular dystrophies.

Ribozymes are small catalytic RNA sequences capable of nucleotide-specific self-cleavage found widespread in nature. Ribozyme cleavage generates distinct 2',3'-phosphate and 5'-hydroxyl termini that resemble substrates for recently characterized RNA repair pathways in cells. We report that ribozyme cleavage of two separate mRNAs activated their scarless trans-ligation and translation into full-length protein in eukaryotic cells, a process that we named StitchR (for Stitch RNA).