HEARTSVG: a fast and accurate method for identifying spatially variable genes in large-scale spatial transcriptomics.

Identifying spatially variable genes (SVGs) is crucial for understanding the spatiotemporal characteristics of diseases and tissue structures, posing a distinctive challenge in spatial transcriptomics research. We propose HEARTSVG, a distribution-free, test-based method for fast and accurately identifying spatially variable genes in large-scale spatial transcriptomic data. Extensive simulations demonstrate that HEARTSVG outperforms state-of-the-art methods with higher F 1 scores (average F 1 Score=0.948), improved computational efficiency, scalability, and reduced false positives (FPs). Through analysis of twelve real datasets from various spatial transcriptomic technologies, HEARTSVG identifies a greater number of biologically significant SVGs (average AUC = 0.792) than other comparative methods without prespecifying spatial patterns. Furthermore, by clustering SVGs, we uncover two distinct tumor spatial domains characterized by unique spatial expression patterns, spatial-temporal locations, and biological functions in human colorectal cancer data, unraveling the complexity of tumors.

CARE as a wearable derived feature linking circadian amplitude to human cognitive functions.

Circadian rhythms are crucial for regulating physiological and behavioral processes. Pineal hormone melatonin is often used to measure circadian amplitude but its collection is costly and time-consuming. Wearable activity data are promising alternative, but the most commonly used measure, relative amplitude, is subject to behavioral masking. In this study, we firstly derive a feature named circadian activity rhythm energy (CARE) to better characterize circadian amplitude and validate CARE by correlating it with melatonin amplitude (Pearson's r = 0.46, P = 0.007) among 33 healthy participants. Then we investigate its association with cognitive functions in an adolescent dataset (Chinese SCHEDULE-A, n = 1703) and an adult dataset (UK Biobank, n = 92,202), and find that CARE is significantly associated with Global Executive Composite (ß = 30.86, P = 0.016) in adolescents, and reasoning ability, short-term memory, and prospective memory (OR = 0.01, 3.42, and 11.47 respectively, all P < 0.001) in adults. Finally, we identify one genetic locus with 126 CARE-associated SNPs using the genome-wide association study, of which 109 variants are used as instrumental variables in the Mendelian Randomization analysis, and the results show a significant causal effect of CARE on reasoning ability, short-term memory, and prospective memory (ß = -59.91, 7.94, and 16.85 respectively, all P < 0.0001). The present study suggests that CARE is an effective wearable-based metric of circadian amplitude with a strong genetic basis and clinical significance, and its adoption can facilitate future circadian studies and potential intervention strategies to improve circadian rhythms and cognitive functions.

Increase the Power of Epigenome-Wide Association Testing Using ICC-Based Hypothesis Weighting.

For large-scale hypothesis testing such as epigenome-wide association testing, adaptively focusing power on the more promising hypotheses can lead to a much more powerful multiple testing procedure. In this chapter, we introduce a multiple testing procedure that weights each hypothesis based on the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), a measure of "noisiness" of CpG methylation measurement, to increase the power of epigenome-wide association testing. Compared to the traditional multiple testing procedure on a filtered CpG set, the proposed procedure circumvents the difficulty to determine the optimal ICC cutoff value and is overall more powerful. We illustrate the procedure and compare the power to classical multiple testing procedures using an example data.

PIS-YOLO: Real-Time Detection for Medical Mask Specification in an Edge Device.

Wearing masks in a crowded environment can reduce the risk of infection; however, wearing nonstandard cloud does not have a good protective effect on the virus, which makes it necessary to monitor the wearing of masks in real time. You only look once (YOLO) series models are widely used in various edge devices. The existing YOLOv5s method meets the requirements of inference time, but it is slightly deficient in terms of accuracy due to its generality. Considering the characteristics of our driver medical mask dataset, a position insensitive loss which is cloud extract shared area feature in different categories and half deformable convolution net methods with cloud concern noteworthy features were introduced into YOLOv5s to improve accuracy, with an increase of 6.7% mean average in @.5 (mAP@.5) and 8.3% in mAP@.5:.95 for our dataset. To ensure that our method can be applied in a real scenario, TensorRT and CUDA were introduced to reduce the inference time in two edge devices (Jetson TX2 and Jetson Nano) and one desktop device, whose inference time was faster than that of previous methods.

SAI-YOLO: A Lightweight Network for Real-Time Detection of Driver Mask-Wearing Specification on Resource-Constrained Devices.

Frequent occurrence and long-term existence of respiratory diseases such as COVID-19 and influenza require bus drivers to wear masks correctly during driving. To quickly detect whether the mask is worn correctly on resource-constrained devices, a lightweight target detection network SAI-YOLO is proposed. Based on YOLOv4-Tiny, the network incorporates the Inception V3 structure, replaces two CSPBlock modules with the RES-SEBlock modules to reduce the number of parameters and computational difficulty, and adds a convolutional block attention module and a squeeze-and-excitation module to extract key feature information. Moreover, a modified ReLU (M-ReLU) activation function is introduced to replace the original Leaky_ReLU function. The experimental results show that SAI-YOLO reduces the number of network parameters and calculation difficulty and improves the detection speed of the network while maintaining certain recognition accuracy. The mean average precision (mAP) for face-mask-wearing detection reaches 86% and the average precision (AP) for mask-wearing normative detection reaches 88%. In the resource-constrained device Raspberry Pi 4B, the average detection time after acceleration is 197 ms, which meets the actual application requirements.

CE-LIF chiral separation of aspartic acid and glutamic acid enantiomers using human serum albumin and sodium cholate as dual selectors.

Sodium cholate (SC), beta-CD, hydroxypropyl (HP)-beta-CD, HSA, and the dual mixtures of them were evaluated for the analysis of aspartic acid (Asp) and glutamic acid (Glu) enantiomers fluorescently tagged with 5-(4,6-dichloro-s-triazin-2-ylamino) fluorescein (DTAF) by CE with LIF detection. Among the investigated chiral selectors and the dual selector systems, the dual selector systems of HSA and SC resulted to be the most useful chiral selectors allowing relatively high chiral resolution. Several experimental parameters such as chiral reagent type and concentration, buffer concentration, and pH, type and concentration of organic modifier were studied in order to find the optimum conditions for the chiral resolution of the two derivatized amino acids in their enantiomers. The effect of different variables that affect derivatization (time, temperature, pH, and DTAF concentration) was studied. Under optimum conditions, the analytes were separated in a short 10.5 min analysis time, and the RSDs for migration time and peak area were less than 0.12 and 2.8%, respectively. The method was applied for the analysis of compound amino acids injection without interference from other amino acids in the sample matrices observed.

Solid-Liquid Separation Properties of Thermoregulated Dicationic Ionic Liquid as Extractant of Dyes from Aqueous Solution.

Two thermoregulated dicationic ionic liquids were synthesized and applied for effective extraction of the common dye malachite green oxalate (MG). The extraction parameters such as amount of ionic liquids, pH of water phase, extraction time, cooling time, and centrifugal time on the extraction efficiency were investigated systematically. It revealed that the dye has been successfully extracted into the ionic liquids, with high extraction efficiency higher than 98%, and recovery of 98.2%-100.8%, respectively. Furthermore, these ionic liquids can be recycled easily after elution. The reusable yields were 87.1% and 88.7%. The extraction of the dye into the thermoregulated ionic liquid provides a method of minimizing pollution of waste water potentially.

Hematopoietic effect of fractions from the enzyme-digested colla corii asini on mice with 5-fluorouracil induced anemia.

Effects of fractions A and B from enzyme-digested traditional Chinese medicine colla corii asini on mice with 5-fluorouracil-induced anemia were investigated. The purpose of this study was to further understand the hematopoietic activities and mechanisms of colla corii asini. The fractions A and B were administered to anemic mice for 12 days. After confirming the anti-anemic effect of fractions A and B, we examined the effects of fractions A and B on immature granulocyte and erythroid cell activity and plasma cytokine level. Fraction A administration at 2 g/kg and 1 g/kg and fraction B administration at 1.6 g/kg and 0.8 g/kg activated granulocyte and erythrocyte progenitor cells in bone marrow and erythrocyte progenitors in spleen, led to the recovery of white blood cell and red blood cell counts, and increased the percentage of peripheral reticulocytes in red cells. The GM-CSF and EPO production determined by examining GM-CSF mRNA and EPO mRNA in the kidney and liver of the anemic mice were also enhanced. This treatment significantly increased serum GM-CSF and EPO level and lowered serum transforming growth factor (TGF-beta) level. These results suggested that fractions A and B promoted hematopoiesis by activating immature granulocyte and erythroid cells, partly by stimulating GM-CSF and EPO secretion and suppressing TGF-beta release. Identification of a specific peptide or protein is still required for the development of a novel medicine for anemia caused by malignancy or chemotherapy.

Rapid and sensitive determination of anthraquinones in Chinese herb using 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium-based ionic liquid with beta-cyclodextrin as modifier in capillary zone electrophoresis.

The present study reported the ionic liquid (IL) used as running electrolyte in capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) with beta-cyclodextrin (beta-CD) as modifier for the separation of anthraquinones extract of Chinese herb Paedicalyx attopevensis Pierre ex Pitard. The optimum running electrolyte was 60 mM 1-butyl-3-methylimizolium tetrafluoroborate (1B-3MI-TFB) solution with 4.0 mM beta-CD. The pH was 10.00 and the applied voltage was 20 kV with detection at 254 nm. The present method was compared with others and the effect of Joule heating was discussed as well. More significantly, this method is the development of the ionic liquids application to the capillary electrophoresis.

[Study on the constituents of volatile oil from Ocimum basilicum].

OBJECTIVE: To study the constituents of volatile oil from Ocimum basilicum. METHOD: GC-MS technique was used. RESULT: Forty-five compounds was elucidated through consulting literature and searching database by computer. CONCLUSION: The main constituent in volatile oil from O. basilicum are 1, 7-dimethyl-1, 6-octadien-3-ol, which accounts for 29.87%.

[Studies on water-soluble chemical constituents in root of Achyranthes bidentata].

OBJECTIVE: To study the water-soluble chemical constituents in root of Achyranthes bidentata. METHOD: The chemical constituents were isolated by silica gel column chromatography and the structures were elucidated by the NMR spectra and physico-chemical properties. RESULT: Seven compounds were obtained and identified as n-butyl-beta-D-fructopyranoside (I), oleanoic acid (II), 3-O-[beta-D-glucopyranosyl], oleanoic acid 28-O-beta-D-glucopyranoside (III), allantoin (IV), 20-hydroxy ecdysone (V), glutamic acid (VI), 3-O-[beta-D-glucopyranosyl], oleanoic acid 28-O-beta-D-glucopyranosyl ester (VII). CONCLUSION: Compounds III-VII were obtained from this plant for the first time.

Synthesis, characterization, and DFT studies of a new chiral ionic liquid from (S)-1-phenylethylamine.

A new chiral ionic liquid was synthesized from (S)-1-phenylethylamine and it was studied by IR, Raman, polarimetry, NMR and X-ray crystal diffraction. Its vibrational spectral bands are precisely ascribed to the studied structure with the aid of DFT theoretical calculations. The optimized geometries and calculated vibrational frequencies are evaluated via comparison with experimental values. The vibrational spectral data obtained from IR and Raman spectra are assigned based on the results of the theoretical calculations by the DFT-B3LYP method at 6-311G(d,p) level. The computed vibrational frequencies were scaled by scale factors to yield a good agreement with observed experimental vibrational frequencies.The vibrational modes assignments were performed by using the animation option of GaussView5.0 graphical interface for Gaussian program.

Inclusion complex formation of ionic liquids with cucurbit[7]uril studied by competitive binding of methylene blue fluorescent probe.

Methylene blue (MB) was used as a fluorescent probe to study the encapsulation of three kinds of 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium ionic liquids in cucurbit[7]uril (CB7) at pH 3. Addition of ionic liquids to the aqueous solution of MB-CB7 inclusion complexes brought about considerable fluorescence intensity quenching, and it was because that MB was extruded from the cavity of CB7 into the aqueous phase by the ionic liquid. NMR and AM1 semi-empirical calculations indicated that the 1-butyl-imidazolium moiety of ionic liquid was responsible for the complexation with CB7.

Fluorescence studies of interaction between flavonol p-coumaroylglucoside tiliroside and bovine serum albumin.

In this paper, the interaction between flavonol p-coumaroylglucoside tiliroside and BSA was investigated by fluorescence quenching spectra, synchronous fluorescence spectra, and three-dimensional fluorescence spectra under simulative physiological conditions. It was proved that the fluorescence quenching of BSA by tiliroside was mainly a result of the formation of a tiliroside-BSA complex. The modified Stern-Volmer quenching constant and the corresponding thermodynamic parameters DeltaH, DeltaG and DeltaS at different temperatures were calculated. The results indicated that electrostatic interactions were the predominant intermolecular forces in stabilizing the complex. The distance r=3.95 nm between the donor (BSA) and acceptor (tiliroside) was obtained according to Förster's nonradioactive energy transfer theory. The synchronous fluorescence and three-dimensional fluorescence spectra results showed the microenvironment and conformation of BSA were changed in the binding reaction.

Rapid separation and determination of aconitine alkaloids in traditional Chinese herbs by capillary electrophoresis using 1-butyl-3-methylimidazoium-based ionic liquid as running electrolyte.

A novel and very simple capillary electrophoretic method for analyzing aconitine components in Aconitum plants was developed using 1-butyl-3-methylimidazoium tetrafluoroborate (1B-3MI-TFB)-based ionic liquid as running electrolyte solution for the first time. The optimum conditions were 35 mM 1B-3MI-TFB solution (pH 8.50) and 15 kV applied voltage. The detection was performed at 254 nm. Aconitine, meaconitine and hypaconitine in Aconitum plants were separated and identified within 5 min. The recoveries were 91.0-103.0% for hypaconitine, 92.8-96.2% for aconitine and 96.0-106.6% for mesaconitine, respectively. Compared with other methods, the analytical time was decreased 4-8-fold and the effect of Joule heating was weaker because the current was smaller.

Determination of p-tyrosol and salidroside in three samples of Rhodiola crenulata and one of Rhodiola kirilowii by capillary zone electrophoresis.

A capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) method has been developed for simultaneous assay of two bioactive components (p-tyrosol and salidroside) in Rhodiola crenulata and Rhodiola kirilowii for the first time. Those analytes were successfully separated within 15 min using 50 mmol L(-1) (pH 9.62) borate containing 30% methanol as running buffer. Regression equations revealed linear relationships (correlation coefficients 0.9998-0.9999) between peak area and concentration of the two analytes. The relative standard deviations ( RSD) of the migration times and the peak areas of two constituents ranged from 0.51 to 0.57% and from 0.65 to 1.17%, respectively, intra-day, and from 4.91 to 6.93% and from 3.51 to 5.33%, respectively, inter-day. The recoveries of two constituents ranged from 96.24 to 103.15%.