Cytochemical and Histochemical Staining with Peptide Antibodies.

Peptide antibodies are particularly useful for immunocytochemistry (ICC) and immunohistochemistry (IHC), where antigens may denature due to fixation of tissues and cells. Peptide antibodies can be made to any defined sequence, including unknown putative proteins and posttranslationally modified sequences. Moreover, the availability of large amounts of the antigen (peptide) allows inhibition/absorption controls, which are important in ICC/IHC, due to the many possibilities for false-positive reactions caused by immunoglobulin Fc receptors, nonspecific reactions and cross-reactivity of primary and secondary antibodies with other antigens and endogenous immunoglobulins, respectively. Here, simple protocols for ICC and IHC are described together with recommendations for appropriate controls.

Optimal jam-absorption driving strategy for mitigating rear-end collision risks with oscillations on freeway straight segments.

Traffic oscillations (or stop-and-go waves) in freeway traffic jam cause large variation of vehicle speed and remarkably reduce travel safety. Previous jam-absorption driving strategies focused on the operational side and did not consider the safety effects caused by the controlled vehicle on freeways. In this paper, we proposed an optimal jam-absorption driving strategy to mitigate traffic oscillations and rear-end collision risks on freeway straight segments. Firstly, the proposed strategy determined the starting and ending point of an oscillation at the temporal and spatial dimensions based on the Wavelet Transform (WT) and the steady equilibrium condition of car-following driving. Then different controlled vehicles were evaluated by the given absorbing speeds. Various measurements were considered to evaluate the safety performance of the strategies. The optimal solution was obtained which guided the controlled vehicle to move slowly at the optimal jam-absorbing speed, and created a gap to eliminate the downstream oscillation timely but avoid causing secondary wave in the upstream traffic. The Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) was modified to build the simulation platform in a connected environment. The results showed that our proposed strategy effectively reduced the severity of traffic oscillations, or even fully eliminate the oscillations. The optimal strategy reduced the surrogate safety measures by 93.53 %-94.78 %, and decreased the total travel time by 1.27 %. We also compared our strategy with previous strategies and the results suggested that ours had better performances.

Using Phospho-Peptides Immobilized on Magnetic Beads for Absorption Control in Immunohistochemistry.

Phospho-specific primary antibodies are used in immunohistochemistry (IHC) to detect phosphorylated sequences in proteins, in some cases they may also cross-react with non- or de-phosphorylated sequences. To rule out nonspecific staining, and to determine that the staining pattern is specific it is necessary to employ a so-called absorption control: phospho-specific primary antibodies are first incubated with phospho-peptide immunogen to block antibody binding sites, and this mixture is applied to tissue sections. If the antibody pre-blocked with cognate immunogen does not produce tissue staining, then the antibody is considered specific. However, if the staining does occur, it indicates that the antibody is nonspecific. The drawback of doing absorption by mixing the peptide with the antibody is that in solution such peptide-antibody complexes can dissociate unblocking the antibody which becomes capable of binding to cell and tissue targets, producing unwanted staining. To overcome this problem, we have developed a simple absorption control technique allowing for efficient blocking of phospho-specific antibodies with phospho-peptides immobilized on magnetic beads. This technique allows for sequestration of peptide-antibody complex from the incubation mixture eliminating the risk of un-blocking primary antibodies via their dissociation from the blocking peptide.

Efficient Thermal-Light Interconversions Based on Optical Topological Transition in the Metal-Dielectric Multilayered Metamaterials.

Metal-dielectric multilayered metamaterials are proposed to work as wideband spectral-selective emitters/absorbers due to the topological change in isofrequency contour around the epsilon-near-zero point. By setting the transition at the border between the visible and IR ranges, the metal-dielectric multilayered metamaterials become good absorbers/emitters for visible light and good reflectors for IR light, which are desirable for efficient thermal-light interconversions.

Electrically tunable coherent optical absorption in graphene with ion gel.

We demonstrate electrical control over coherent optical absorption in a graphene-based Salisbury screen consisting of a single layer of graphene placed in close proximity to a gold back reflector. The screen was designed to enhance light absorption at a target wavelength of 3.2 µm by using a 600 nm-thick, nonabsorbing silica spacer layer. An ionic gel layer placed on top of the screen was used to electrically gate the charge density in the graphene layer. Spectroscopic reflectance measurements were performed in situ as a function of gate bias. The changes in the reflectance spectra were analyzed using a Fresnel based transfer matrix model in which graphene was treated as an infinitesimally thin sheet with a conductivity given by the Kubo formula. The analysis reveals that a careful choice of the ionic gel layer thickness can lead to optical absorption enhancements of up to 5.5 times for the Salisbury screen compared to a suspended sheet of graphene. In addition to these absorption enhancements, we demonstrate very large electrically induced changes in the optical absorption of graphene of ∼3.3% per volt, the highest attained so far in a device that features an atomically thick active layer. This is attributable in part to the more effective gating achieved with the ion gel over the conventional dielectric back gates and partially by achieving a desirable coherent absorption effect linked to the presence of the thin ion gel that boosts the absorption by 40%.

Uncovering the mechanism for selective control of the visible and near-IR absorption bands in bacteriochlorophylls a, b and g.

Bacteriochlorophylls (BChls) play an important role as light harvesters in photosynthetic bacteria. Interestingly, bacteriochlorophylls (BChls) a, b, and g selectively tune their visible (Qx) and near IR (Qy) absorption bands by the substituent changes. In this paper, we theoretically study the mechanism for the selective control of the absorption bands. Density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent DFT (TD-DFT) and four-orbital model analyses reveal that the selective red-shift of the Qy band with the substituent change from BChl a to b occurs with the lower-energy shift of the (HOMO, LUMO) excited state directly induced by the molecular-orbital energy changes. In contrast, the Qx band hardly shifts by the cancellation between the higher- and lower-energy shifts of the (HOMO-1, LUMO) excited state directly induced by the molecular-orbital energy changes and configuration interaction, respectively. On the other hand, with the substituent changes from BChl a to g, the Qx band selectively blue-shifts by the larger higher-energy shift of the (HOMO-1, LUMO) excited state directly induced by the molecular-orbital energy shifts than the lower-energy shift due to the configuration interaction. In contrast, the Qy band hardly shifts by the cancellation between the higher- and lower-energy shifts of the (HOMO, LUMO) excited state directly induced by the molecular-orbital energy changes and configuration interaction, respectively. Our work provides the important knowledge for understanding how nature controls the light-absorption properties of the BChl dyes, which might be also useful for design of porphyrinoid chromophores.