Introduction: Next-generation sequencing applications are becoming indispensable for clinical diagnostics. These experiments require numerous wet- and dry-laboratory steps, each one increasing the probability of a sample swap or contamination. Therefore, identity confirmation at the end of the process is recommended to ensure the right data are used for each patient.
Methods: We tested three commercially available, single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based sample tracking kits in a diagnostic workflow to evaluate their ease of use and performance. The coverage uniformity, on-target specificity, sample identification, and genotyping performance were determined to assess the reliability and cost effectiveness of each kit.
Results And Discussion: Hands-on time and manual steps are almost identical for the kits from pxlence and Nimagen. The Swift kit has an extra purification step, making it the longest and most demanding protocol. Furthermore, the Swift kit failed to correctly genotype 26 of the 46 samples. The Nimagen kit identified all but one sample and the pxlence kit unambiguously identified all samples, making it the most reliable and robust kit of this evaluation. The Nimagen kit showed poor on-target mapping rates, resulting in deeper sequencing needs and higher sequencing costs compared with the other two kits.
Conclusion: Our conclusion is that the Human Sample ID kit from pxlence is the most cost effective of the three tested tools for DNA sample tracking and identification.
Introduction: Military body fat standards were implemented in the 1980s to prevent obesity and associated poor military readiness. In the past 2 decades, enforcement of existing Army body composition standards has been eroded by the steady increase in national obesity rates, the demand for new recruits especially during the 2007 surge in Iraq, and the COVID epidemic in 2020. The diminishing qualified recruit pool puts a new focus on accession standards.
Intentional nuclear forensics is a concept wherein the deliberate addition of benign and persistent material signatures to nuclear material can be used to reduce the time between the discovery of material outside of regulatory control and determination of its original provenance. One concept within intentional nuclear forensics involves the use of perturbed stable isotopes to generate unique isotope ratio "barcodes" to encode information (e.g.
Electrochemical liquid-cell transmission electron microscopy (e-LCTEM) offers great potential for investigating the structural dynamics of nanomaterials during electrochemical reactions. However, challenges arise from the difficulty in achieving the optimal electrolyte thickness, leading to inconsistent electrochemical responses and limited spatial resolution. In this study, we present advanced e-LCTEM techniques tailored for tracking Pt/C degradation under electrochemical polarization at short intervals with high spatial resolution.
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Advanced Machines and Design, Institute of Engineering Research, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Soft sensors integrated or attached to robots or human bodies enable rapid and accurate estimation of the physical states of the target systems, including position, orientation, and force. While the use of a number of sensors enhances precision and reliability in estimation, it may constrain the movement of the target system or make the entire system complex and bulky. This article proposes a rapid, efficient framework for determining where to place the sensors on the system given the limited number of available sensors.
A wavelength demodulation method for ultra-short fiber Bragg grating (US-FBG) sensors based on an arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) and a convex optimization algorithm is proposed and demonstrated. Instead of measuring the output power ratio of the two adjacent AWG channels as previously done, in this work the wavelength demodulation is realized by reconstructing the US-FBG spectrum. The principle of spectral reconstruction involves using an AWG to sample the spectral information of US-FBG and constructing underdetermined matrix equations with the obtained prior information on transmission responses and the detected output power from multiple AWG channels.
