Catalytic Gold Nanoparticle Assembly Programmed by DNAzyme Circuits.

Assembled gold nanoparticle (AuNP) superstructures can generate unique physicochemical characteristics and be used in various applications, thus becoming an attractive research field. Recently, several DNA-assisted gold nanoparticle assembly methods have been rigorously developed that typically require a non-catalytic equimolar molecular assembly to guarantee the designed assembly. Although efficient and accurate, exploring such non-catalytic nanoparticle assemblies in the complex cellular milieu under low trigger concentrations remains challenging. Therefore, developing a catalytic method that facilitates gold nanoparticle assemblies with relatively low DNA trigger concentrations is desirable. In this report, a catalytic method to program gold nanoparticle assemblies by DNAzyme circuits is presented, where only a small number of DNA triggers are able to induce the production of a large number of the desired nanoparticle assemblies. The feasibility of using logic DNAzyme circuits to control catalytic nanoparticle assemblies is experimentally verified. Additionally, catalytic AuNP assembly systems are established with cascading and feedback functions. The work provides an alternative research direction to enrich the tool library of nanoparticle assembly and their application in biosensing and nanomedicine.

Enzyme-Programmed Self-Assembly of Nanoparticles.

Nanoparticles are a hot topic in the field of nanomaterial research due to their excellent physical and chemical properties. In recent years, DNA-directed nanoparticle self-assembly technology has been widely applied to the development of numerous complex nanoparticle superstructures. Due to the inherent stability and surface electric repulsion of nanoparticles, it is difficult to make nanoparticle superstructures respond to molecular signals in the external environment. In fact, enzyme-programmed molecular systems are developed to allow diverse functions, including logical operations, signal amplification, and dynamic assembly control. Therefore, combining enzyme-controlled DNA systems may endow nanoparticle assembly systems with more flexibility in program design, allowing them to respond to a variety of external signals. In this review, we summarize the basic principles of enzyme-controlled DNA/nanoparticle self-assembly and introduce its applications in heavy metal detection, gene expression, proteins inside living cells, cancer cell therapy, and drug delivery. With the continuous development of new nanoparticle materials and the increasing functionality of enzyme DNA circuits, enzyme-directed DNA/nanoparticle self-assembled probe technology is expected to see significant future development.

Efficient Dynamic Phase Splitting Driven by Centrifugal Force for CO2 Capture from Flue Gas using Biphasic Solvents.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) chemisorption using biphasic solvents has been regarded as a promising approach, but challenges remain in achieving efficient dynamic phase-splitting during practical implementation. To address this, the centrifugal force was innovatively adopted to enhance the coalescence and separation of immiscible fine droplets within the biphasic solvent. The comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that centrifugal phase-splitting shows outstanding separation efficiency (>95%) and excellent applicability for various solvents. Correlation analysis reveals a strong relationship between the rich phase's viscosity, lean phase's residual CO2, and the phase separation efficiency. The time-profile behavior of immiscible droplets, observed through microscope images of phase-splitting, enables the estimation of the growth and coalescence rates of the discrete phase. Industrial-scale process simulation for technical and economic analysis confirms that the total capture cost ($ 42.5/t CO2) can be reduced by ∼22% with the use of biphasic solvents and a centrifugal separator compared to conventional methods. This study introduces a fresh perspective on polarity-induced cluster generation and coagulation-induced separation, offering an effective solution to address the challenges associated with dynamic phase-splitting in biphasic solvents during practical applications.

Assessment of the impact of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol on retinal vessels using optical coherence tomography angiography.

BACKGROUND: Low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) is acknowledged as an independent risk factor (IRF) for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Nevertheless, studies on the impact of LDL-C on microvasculature are still scarce. The retina, abundant in microvasculature, can now be examined for microvascular alterations through the novel, non-invasive, and quantitative optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) technique. METHODS: In this cross-sectional study, 243 patients from the geriatric department were recruited (between December 2022 and December 2023). Individuals were classified into four groups based on their LDL-C levels: Group 1 (≤ 1.8 mmol/L), Group 2 (> 1.8 mmol/L to ≤ 2.6 mmol/L), Group 3 (> 2.6 mmol/L to ≤ 3.4 mmol/L), and Group 4 (> 3.4 mmol/L). The OCTA results including retinal vessel density (VD), foveal avascular zone (FAZ) area, macula thickness, and retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness were contrasted across these groups. T-tests, analysis of variance, Welch's tests, or rank-sum tests were employed for statistical comparisons. In cases where significant differences between groups were found, post-hoc multiple comparisons or rank-sum tests were performed for pairwise group comparisons. Spearman's correlation coefficient was employed to perform bivariate correlation analysis to evaluate the relationship between LDL-C levels and various OCTA measurements. Multivariable regression analysis was used to evaluate the association between LDL-C levels and various OCTA measurements. Linear regression analysis or mixed-effects linear models were applied. RESULTS: It was discovered that individuals with LDL-C levels exceeding 2.6 mmol/L (Groups 3 and 4) exhibited reduced VD in the retina, encompassing both the optic disc and macular regions, compared to those with LDL-C levels at or below 2.6 mmol/L (Groups 1 and 2). A negative correlation among LDL-C levels and retinal VD was identified, with r values spanning from - 0.228 to -0.385. Further regression analysis presented ß values between - 0.954 and - 2.378. Additionally, no notable disparities were detected among the groups regarding FAZ area, macular thickness, and RNFL thickness. CONCLUSIONS: The outcomes of this study suggest that elevated LDL-C levels constitute an IRF for decreased VD across the entire retina. TRIAL REGISTRATION: NCT05644548, December 1, 2022.

Iruplinalkib (WX­0593), a novel ALK/ROS1 inhibitor, overcomes crizotinib resistance in preclinical models for non-small cell lung cancer.

Despite remarkable initial responses of anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) inhibitors in ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients, cancers eventually develop resistance within one to two years. This study aimed to compare the properties of iruplinalkib (WX­0593) with other ALK inhibitors and report the comprehensive characterization of iruplinalkib against the crizotinib resistance. The inhibitory effect of iruplinalkib on kinase activity was detected. A kinase screen was performed to evaluate the selectivity of iruplinalkib. The effect of iruplinalkib on related signal transduction pathways of ALK and c-ros oncogene 1 (ROS1) kinases was examined. The cellular and in vivo activities of ALK inhibitors were compared in engineered cancer-derived cell lines and in mice xenograft models, respectively. Human hepatocytes derived from three donors were used for evaluating hepatic enzyme inducing activity. HEK293 cell lines expressing transportors were used to invesigated the drug interaction potential mediated by several transporters. The results showed iruplinalkib potently inhibited the tyrosine autophosphorylation of wild-type ALK, ALKL1196M, ALKC1156Y and epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)L858R/T790M. The inhibitory effects of iruplinalkib in patient-derived xenograft and cell line-derived xenograft models were observed. Moreover, iruplinalkib showed robust antitumor effects in BALB/c nude mice xenograft models with ALK-/ROS1-positive tumors implanted subcutaneously, and the tumor suppressive effects in crizotinib-resistant model was significantly better than that of brigatinib. Iruplinalkib did not induce CYP1A2, CYP2B6 and CYP3A4 at therapeutic concentration, and was also a strong inhibitor of MATE1 and MATE2K transporters, as well as P-gp and BCRP. In conclusion, iruplinalkib, a highly active and selective ALK/ROS1 inhibitor, exhibited strong antitumor effects in vitro and in crizotinib-resistant models.

Sensitive response mechanism of ARGs and MGEs to initial designed temperature during swine manure and food waste co-composting.

The rapid aerobic composting process has been used to reduce organic wastes, but the associated risks of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) need to evaluate in an efficient way. The primary objective of this work was to explore the underlying mechanism of initial adjustment in composting temperature on the variation of ARGs, mobile genetic elements (MGEs), and microbial composition during co-composting. The co-composting was initially externally heated (T2) for 5 days. The results showed that ARGs abundance in conventional composting (T1) was reduced by 49.36%, while multidrug was enriched by 86.16% after a period of 30 days. While in T2 ARGs were removed by 79.46% particularly the fraction of sulfonamide, multidrug, and vancomycin resistance genes were >90% without rebounding of any ARGs. Whereas, MGEs were reduced by 68.12% and 93.62% in T1 and T2, while the half-lives of ARGs and MGEs were lower in T2 compared to T1 (86.3%,86.7%). T2 also affected the metabolism function by regulating carbohydrate metabolism (9.62-10.39%) and amino acid metabolism (9.92-10.93%). Apart from this, the potential human pathogenic bacteria Pseudomonas was reduced by 90.6% in T2 and only 32.9% in T1 respectively. Network analysis showed that Ureibacillus, Weissella, Corynebacterium, Escherichia-Shigella, Acinetobacter were the main host of multiple genes. Structural equation models exhibited that bacterial communities were mainly responsible for the enrichment of ARGs in T1, whereas, it was directly affected by MGEs in T2. Similarly, ARGs variation was directly related to composting temperature. With this simple strategy, ARGs associated risk can be significantly reduced in composting.

Prevalence and associated health and lifestyle factors of myopic maculopathy in northern China: the Kailuan eye study.

BACKGROUND: To evaluate the prevalence and associated health and lifestyle factors of myopic maculopathy (MM) in a northern Chinese industrial city. METHODS: The cross-sectional Kailuan Eye Study included subjects who participated in the longitudinal Kailuan Study in 2016. Ophthalmologic and general examinations were performed on all the participants. MM was graded based on fundus photographs using the International Photographic Classification and Grading System. The prevalence of MM was evaluated. Univariate and multiple logistic regression were adopted to evaluated risk factors of MM. RESULTS: The study included 8330 participants with gradable fundus photographs for MM and ocular biometry data. The prevalence of MM was 1.11% (93/8330; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.89-1.33%). Diffuse chorioretinal atrophy, patchy chorioretinal atrophy, macular atrophy, and plus lesions were observed in 72 (0.9%), 15 (0.2%), 6 (0.007%), and 32 eyes (0.4%), respectively. MM was more common in eyes with longer axial length (OR 4.517; 95%CI 3.273 to 6.235) and in participants with hypertension (OR 3.460; 95%CI 1.152 to 10.391), and older age (OR 1.084; 95%CI 1.036 to 1.134). CONCLUSIONS: The MM was present in 1.11% of the northern Chinese individuals 21 years or older and the associate factors include longer axial length, older age, and hypertension.

Co-occurrence pattern of ARGs and N-functional genes in the aerobic composting system with initial elevated temperature.

Animal manure is known to harbor antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). Aerobic composting is a prevalent cost-effective and sustainable method to treat animal waste. However, the effect of initially elevated temperature on antibiotic resistome during the composting process is unclear. In this study composting was subjected to initial external heating (EHC) for a period of 5 days compared to conventional composting (CC). After composting ARGs abundance was significantly reduced by 2.43 log in EHC and 1.95 log in CC. Mobile genetic elements (MGEs) also exhibited a reduction of 1.95 log in EHC and 1.49 log in CC. However, during the cooling phase, the genes resisting macrolide lincosamide and streptogramin B (MLSB) rebounded by 0.04 log in CC. The potential human pathogenic bacteria Pseudomonas (41.5-61.5%) and Actinobacteria (98.4-98.8%) were significantly reduced in both treatments and the bulk of targeted antibiotics were eliminated by 80.74% in EHC and 68.98% in CC. ARGs and N-functional genes (NFGs), mainly denitrification genes, were carried by the same microbial species, such as Corynebacterium sp. and Bacillus sp., of the dominant phylum. Redundancy analysis (RDA) revealed that CC microbial communities played a key role in the enrichment of ARGs while in EHC the variation of ARGs was attributed to the composting temperature. The number of high-risk ARGs was also lower in EHC (4) compared with CC (6) on day 30. These results provide insight into the effects of an initially enhanced temperature on ARGs removal and the relationship between ARGs and NFGs during the composting process.

A Spatially Programmable DNA Nanorobot Arm to Modulate Anisotropic Gold Nanoparticle Assembly by Enzymatic Excision.

Programmable assembly of gold nanoparticle superstructures with precise spatial arrangement has drawn much attention for their unique characteristics in plasmonics and biomedicine. Bio-inspired methods have already provided programmable, molecular approaches to direct AuNP assemblies using biopolymers. The existing methods, however, predominantly use DNA as scaffolds to directly guide the AuNP interactions to produce intended superstructures. New paradigms for regulating AuNP assembly will greatly enrich the toolbox for DNA-directed AuNP manipulation and fabrication. Here, we developed a strategy of using a spatially programmable enzymatic nanorobot arm to modulate anisotropic DNA surface modifications and assembly of AuNPs. Through spatial controls of the proximity of the reactants, the locations of the modifications were precisely regulated. We demonstrated the control of the modifications on a single 15 nm AuNP, as well as on a rectangular DNA origami platform, to direct unique anisotropic AuNP assemblies. This method adds an alternative enzymatic manipulation to DNA-directed AuNP superstructure assembly.

Automated detection of severe diabetic retinopathy using deep learning method.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to develop and validate the intelligent diagnosis of severe DR with lesion recognition based on color fundus photography. METHODS: The Kaggle public dataset for DR grading is used in the project, including 53,576 fundus photos in the test set, 28,101 in the training set, and 7,025 in the validation set. We randomly select 4,192 images for lesion annotation. Inception V3 structure is adopted as the classification algorithm. Both 299 × 299 pixel images and 896 × 896 pixel images are used as the input size. ROC curve, AUC, sensitivity, specificity, and their harmonic mean are used to evaluate the performance of the models. RESULTS: The harmonic mean and AUC of the model of 896 × 896 input are higher than those of the 299 × 299 input model. The sensitivity, specificity, harmonic mean, and AUC of the method with 896 × 896 resolution images as input for severe DR are 0.925, 0.907, 0.916, and 0.968, respectively. The prediction error mainly occurs in moderate NPDR, and cases with more hard exudates and cotton wool spots are easily predicted as severe cases. Cases with preretinal hemorrhage and vitreous hemorrhage are easily identified as severe cases, and IRMA is the most difficult lesion to recognize. CONCLUSIONS: We have studied the intelligent diagnosis of severe DR based on color fundus photography. This artificial intelligence-based technology offers a possibility to increase the accessibility and efficiency of severe DR screening.

CLINICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF STREAKY MULTIFOCAL CHOROIDITIS: A Subtype of Multifocal Choroiditis.

PURPOSE: To describe and analyze clinical characteristics of multifocal choroiditis with linear streaks (LSs). METHODS: Eight cases of multifocal choroiditis with LSs were retrospectively studied. Multimodal imaging was performed. Demographic data and spherical equivalent were collected. Axial length was measured. RESULTS: All cases are young myopic women with a mean age of 17.13 ± 3.64 years (range, 13-23 years), presenting with vision loss and distortion. Nine eyes with LSs were high myopia of -8.97 ± 2.69 D (range, -6.00 to 12.5 D; growing by 1.88 ± 0.61 D annually since wearing glasses), with mean axial length of 26.36 ± 1.71 mm. Vitreous cells were noted in seven eyes. LSs were located in the equator (eight eyes), around the optic disk (three eyes), and at the edge of the posterior pole (one eye). Angio-optical coherence tomography showed choroidal neovascularization in eight eyes, especially 2 to 3 choroidal neovascularizations in three eyes. The location of choroidal neovascularization were in subfovea (three eyes), parafovea (six eyes), and perifovea (two eyes). Swept source optical coherence tomography showed punched-out disruption of retinal pigment epithelium‒Bruch's membrane‒choriocapillaris complex at the LSs' sites. LSs showed fluorescence staining on late FA but hypofluorescence throughout all phases on ICGA. CONCLUSION: Multifocal choroiditis with LSs mostly occurs in young women with high myopia, especially occurring in eyes with rapid progression of myopia. LSs are mainly located in the midperiphery near the equator, being prone to concur with choroidal neovascularization. Based on our findings, we propose a new term called "streaky multifocal choroiditis" as a subtype of multifocal choroiditis.

Herpetic uveitis caused by herpes simplex virus after cataract surgery in a patient without prior viral keratitis or uveitis: a case report.

BACKGROUND: To report a case of herpetic uveitis caused by herpes simplex virus after cataract surgery in a patient without prior viral keratitis or uveitis. CASE PRESENTATION: A 70-year-old female was referred to our clinic with a 16-day history of acute blurry vision with painful redness in the right eye. She accepted cataract surgery for the right eye ten days before initial of ocular symptoms. There was significant inflammation in anterior chamber of the right eye. Retina exam showed moderate dense vitreous opacity but not necrotic or focal retinal lesion in the right eye. The aqueous humor collected from the right eye was positive for herpes simplex virus (HSV) DNA by PCR. The diagnosis of herpetic uveitis in the right eye was made due to clinical presentations and aqueous humor examination. CONCLUSION: Herpetic virus reactivation might occasionally occur after intraocular surgery in patients without prior ocular viral diseases, inducing atypical postoperative intraocular inflammation.

A Strategy for Rapid Discovery of Marker Peptides Associated with Fibrinolytic Efficacy of Pheretima aspergillum Based on Bioinformatics Combined with Parallel Reaction Monitoring.

Quality control of animal-derived traditional Chinese medicines has improved dramatically as proteomics research advanced in the past few decades. However, it remains challenging to identify quality attributes with routine proteomics approaches since protein with fibrinolytic activity is rarely reported in pheretima, a typical animal-derived traditional medicine. A novel strategy based on bioinformatics combined with parallel reaction monitoring (PRM) was developed here to rapidly discover the marker peptides associated with a fibrinolytic effect. Potential marker peptides were found by lumbrokinase sequences' alignment and in silico digestion. The fibrinogen zymography was used to visually identify fibrinolytic proteins in pheretima. As a result, it was found that the fibrinolytic activity varied among different portions of pheretima. Fibrinolytic proteins were distributed regionally in the anterior and anterior-mid portion and there was no significant fibrinogenolytic activity observed in the mid-posterior and posterior portion. Finally, PRM experiments were deployed to validate and quantify selected marker peptides and a total of 11 peptides were identified as marker peptides, which could be potentially used in quality control of pheretima. This strategy provides a robust workflow to benefit the quality control of other animal-derived traditional medicines.

Deep learning-based detection and stage grading for optimising diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy.

AIMS: To establish an automated method for identifying referable diabetic retinopathy (DR), defined as moderate nonproliferative DR and above, using deep learning-based lesion detection and stage grading. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A set of 12,252 eligible fundus images of diabetic patients were manually annotated by 45 licenced ophthalmologists and were randomly split into training, validation, and internal test sets (ratio of 7:1:2). Another set of 565 eligible consecutive clinical fundus images was established as an external test set. For automated referable DR identification, four deep learning models were programmed based on whether two factors were included: DR-related lesions and DR stages. Sensitivity, specificity and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) were reported for referable DR identification, while precision and recall were reported for lesion detection. RESULTS: Adding lesion information to the five-stage grading model improved the AUC (0.943 vs. 0.938), sensitivity (90.6% vs. 90.5%) and specificity (80.7% vs. 78.5%) of the model for identifying referable DR in the internal test set. Adding stage information to the lesion-based model increased the AUC (0.943 vs. 0.936) and sensitivity (90.6% vs. 76.7%) of the model for identifying referable DR in the internal test set. Similar trends were also seen in the external test set. DR lesion types with high precision results were preretinal haemorrhage, hard exudate, vitreous haemorrhage, neovascularisation, cotton wool spots and fibrous proliferation. CONCLUSIONS: The herein described automated model employed DR lesions and stage information to identify referable DR and displayed better diagnostic value than models built without this information.

Cryptotanshinone ameliorates cardiac injury and cardiomyocyte apoptosis in rats with coronary microembolization.

Coronary microembolization (CME) is a prevalent cardiovascular disease, especially nowadays when percutaneous coronary intervention is widely applied. However, neither cardio-protective agents nor devices for distal protection could effectively prevent the occurrence of CME. Therefore, we aimed to develop a new drug for CME. Rats were orally administrated with different doses of Cryptotanshinone (CTS, 5, 15, 45 mg/kg) daily for 2 weeks, respectively, following CME surgery. Then cardiac function and cardiac injury were evaluated in CME rats as well as measuring oxidative stress and apoptosis in cardiomyocytes. Compared to sham group, CME operation induced cardiac dysfunction, cardiac injury, the activation of platelet and endothelium, cardiomyocyte apoptosis and oxidative stress, all of which could be dose-dependently restored by CTS pretreatment. Moreover, NF-κB signaling pathway participated in the development of CME and also in the preventive process of CTS against CME. CTS might serve as a potential and promising candidate drug to prevent the occurrence of CME.

An Entropic Approach to Estimating the Instability Criterion of People in Floodwaters.

People are always susceptible to a loss of stability in urban floodwaters that leads to serious casualties. Thus, the safety criterion for the instability of people in floodwaters must be determined. In this study, the hydrodynamic criterion of the instability of people in floodwaters in terms of the incipient velocity and water depth is derived using the probability method based on Shannon entropy theory. The derived model can characterize variations in the incipient velocity of people in floodwaters with respect to the inundating water depth. Furthermore, a comparison with seven experimental datasets available in the literature shows the validity of the proposed entropy-based model considering data scattering. A sensitivity analysis of the derived model to some of the incorporated parameters was performed, and the qualitative results are in accordance with our understanding of the physical mechanism of the instability of people in floodwaters. Taking the physical parameters (height and mass) of Chinese adults and children as a representative example, this study also showed the vulnerability degree of Chinese adults and children subject to floodwaters. These findings could provide a reference for administrators and stakeholders for flood hazard mitigation and flood strategy management. This study shows that an entropy-based method could be a valuable addition to existing deterministic models for characterizing the instability criterion of people in an urban flooding event.

High-throughput DNA sequence data compression.

The exponential growth of high-throughput DNA sequence data has posed great challenges to genomic data storage, retrieval and transmission. Compression is a critical tool to address these challenges, where many methods have been developed to reduce the storage size of the genomes and sequencing data (reads, quality scores and metadata). However, genomic data are being generated faster than they could be meaningfully analyzed, leaving a large scope for developing novel compression algorithms that could directly facilitate data analysis beyond data transfer and storage. In this article, we categorize and provide a comprehensive review of the existing compression methods specialized for genomic data and present experimental results on compression ratio, memory usage, time for compression and decompression. We further present the remaining challenges and potential directions for future research.

CompMap: a reference-based compression program to speed up read mapping to related reference sequences.

SUMMARY: Exhaustive mapping of next-generation sequencing data to a set of relevant reference sequences becomes an important task in pathogen discovery and metagenomic classification. However, the runtime and memory usage increase as the number of reference sequences and the repeat content among these sequences increase. In many applications, read mapping time dominates the entire application. We developed CompMap, a reference-based compression program, to speed up this process. CompMap enables the generation of a non-redundant representative sequence for the input sequences. We have demonstrated that reads can be mapped to this representative sequence with a much reduced time and memory usage, and the mapping to the original reference sequences can be recovered with high accuracy. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: CompMap is implemented in C and freely available at http://csse.szu.edu.cn/staff/zhuzx/CompMap/. CONTACT: xiaoyang@broadinstitute.org SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Light-weight reference-based compression of FASTQ data.

BACKGROUND: The exponential growth of next generation sequencing (NGS) data has posed big challenges to data storage, management and archive. Data compression is one of the effective solutions, where reference-based compression strategies can typically achieve superior compression ratios compared to the ones not relying on any reference. RESULTS: This paper presents a lossless light-weight reference-based compression algorithm namely LW-FQZip to compress FASTQ data. The three components of any given input, i.e., metadata, short reads and quality score strings, are first parsed into three data streams in which the redundancy information are identified and eliminated independently. Particularly, well-designed incremental and run-length-limited encoding schemes are utilized to compress the metadata and quality score streams, respectively. To handle the short reads, LW-FQZip uses a novel light-weight mapping model to fast map them against external reference sequence(s) and produce concise alignment results for storage. The three processed data streams are then packed together with some general purpose compression algorithms like LZMA. LW-FQZip was evaluated on eight real-world NGS data sets and achieved compression ratios in the range of 0.111-0.201. This is comparable or superior to other state-of-the-art lossless NGS data compression algorithms. CONCLUSIONS: LW-FQZip is a program that enables efficient lossless FASTQ data compression. It contributes to the state of art applications for NGS data storage and transmission. LW-FQZip is freely available online at: http://csse.szu.edu.cn/staff/zhuzx/LWFQZip.

Optical Coherence Tomographic Features and Visual Prognosis after Treatment for Idiopathic Choroidal Neovascularization.

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to determine whether pretreatment spectral-domain optical coherence tomographic (SD-OCT) features are associated with visual prognosis after treatment for idiopathic subfoveal choroidal neovascularization (ISCNV) with intravitreal ranibizumab. METHODS: We retrospectively evaluated SD-OCT images of eyes with ISCNV undergoing treatment with intravitreal ranibizumab with a mean follow-up of 7 months. RESULTS: This study included 22 patients (22 eyes) with a mean age of 32.7 ± 8.1 years. In univariate analysis, better final visual acuity expressed in logMAR units was significantly associated with a lower amount of pretreatment ellipsoid zone defects (p = 0.03; standardized correlation coefficient ß = 0.46) and a lower amount of pretreatment external limiting membrane (ELM) damage (p = 0.007; ß = 0.56). All other SD-OCT parameters were not significantly associated with final visual acuity. A higher improvement in visual acuity was marginally significantly associated with larger pretreatment ellipsoid zone defects (p = 0.049; ß = -0.43). CONCLUSIONS: The integrity of the outer retinal layers at baseline, in particular of the ELM, is of importance in predicting the final visual outcome in patients undergoing intravitreal medical therapy for ISCNV.