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Van der Waals (vdW) heterojunctions, with their unique electronic and optoelectronic properties, have become promising candidates for photodetector applications. Amplifying the contribution of the depletion region in vdW heterojunction, which would enhance both of the collection efficiency and speed of the photogenerated carriers, presents an effective strategy for achieving high performance vdW heterojunction photodetectors. Herein, a fully depleted vdW heterojunction photodetector is built on two-dimensional (2D) semiconductor materials (GaTe and InSe) layered on a pattered bottom electrode in vertical structure, in which the generation and motion of carriers are exclusively achieved in the depletion region. Attributed to the intrinsic built-in electric field, the elimination of series resistance and the depletion region confinement of carriers, the as-fabricated photodetector exhibits prominent photovoltaic properties with a high open-circuit voltage of 0.465 V, as well as photoresponse characteristics with outstanding responsivity, detectivity and photoresponse speed of 63.7 A/W, 3.88 × 1013 Jones, and 32.7 μs respectively. The overall performance of this fully depleted GaTe/InSe vdW heterojunctions photodetectors are ranking high among the top level of 2D materials based photodetectors. It indicates the device architecture can provide new opportunities for the fabrication of high-performance photodetectors.

Circadian stimulus (CS) is a popular metric for evaluating circadian effects of light. However, the determination of its value is complicated. In this work, the possibility of developing a simplified model to accurately estimate CS values has been investigated. It is found that: i) the CS2018 model itself has an important limitation: a very small perturbation in spectrum could result in a significant change in CS value, which fundamentally limits the development of a simplified model based on photometric or colorimetric inputs. ii) such a limitation is effectively reduced by the latest CS2021 model, and therefore a simplified model can be developed to estimate the value of CS2021 based on illuminance, correlated color temperature, a constraint of color rending index, and the factors of the continuous light exposure duration t and the spatial distribution of circadian light exposure f. The simplified model is developed and validated by using a comprehensive data set containing 395923 lighting spectra. The small deviations in CS value, which is less than 0.087 and 0.052 for warm and cool white light sources, respectively, show that the proposed simplified model could serve as an accurate and convenient tool for practical circadian lighting design.

ABSTRACT Metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) can accurately detect pathogens in clinical samples. However, wet-lab contamination constrains mNGS analysis and may result in erroneous interpretation of results. Many existing methods rely on large-scale observational microbiome studies and may not be applicable to clinical mNGS tests. By generation of a pretrained profile of common laboratory contaminants, we developed an mNGS noise-filtering model based on the inverse linear relationship between microbial sequencing reads and sample library concentration, named the background elimination and correction by library concentration-normalized (BECLEAN) model. Its efficacy was evaluated with bacteria- and yeast-spiked samples and 28 cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) specimens. The diagnostic accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and specificity of BECLEAN with reference to conventional methods and diagnosis were 92.9%, 86.7%, 100%, and 86.7%, respectively. BECLEAN led to a dramatic reduction of background noise without affecting the true-positive rate and thus can provide a time-saving and convenient tool in various clinical settings. IMPORTANCE Most of the existing methods to remove wet-lab contamination rely on large-scale observational microbiome studies and may not be applicable to clinical mNGS testing in individual cases. In clinical settings, only a handful of samples might be sequenced in a run. The lab-specific microbiome can complicate existing statistical approaches for removing contamination from small-scale clinical metagenomic sequencing data sets; thus, use of a preliminary lab-specific training set is necessary. Our study provides a rapid and accurate background-filtering tool for clinical metagenomic sequencing by generation of a pretrained profile of common laboratory contaminants. Notably, our work demonstrates that the inverse linear relationship between microbial sequencing reads and library concentration can serve to identify true contaminants and evaluate the relative abundance of a taxon in samples by comparing the observed microbial reads to the model-predicted value. Our findings extend the previously published research and demonstrate confirmatory results in clinical settings.

BackgroundDifferential diagnosis of patients with suspected infections is particularly difficult, but necessary for prompt diagnosis and rational use of antibiotics. A substantial proportion of these patients have non-infectious diseases that include malignant tumors. This study aimed to explore the clinical value of metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) for tumor detection in patients with suspected infections.MethodsA multicenter, prospective case study involving patients diagnosed with suspected infections was conducted in four hospitals in Shanghai, China between July 2019 and January 2020. Based upon mNGS technologies and chromosomal copy number variation (CNV) analysis on abundant human genome, a new procedure named Onco-mNGS was established to simultaneously detect pathogens and malignant tumors in all of the collected samples from patients.ResultsOf 140 patients screened by Onco-mNGS testing, 115 patients were diagnosed with infections; 17 had obvious abnormal CNV signals indicating malignant tumors that were confirmed clinically. The positive percent agreement and negative percent agreement of mNGS testing compared to clinical diagnosis was 53.0% (61/115) and 60% (15/25), vs. 20.9% (24/115) and 96.0% (24/25), respectively, for conventional microbiological testing (both P

Background: Lung biopsy tissue samples can be used for infection detection and cancer diagnosis. Metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) has the potential to further improve diagnosis. Methods: From July 2018 to May 2020, lung biopsy samples of 133 patients with suspected pulmonary infection or abnormal imaging findings were collected and subjected to clinical microbiological testing, Illumina and Nanopore sequencing to identify pathogens. The neural networks were pretrained by extracting features of human reads from 2,095 metagenomic next-generation sequencing results, and the human reads of lung biopsy samples were entered into the validated pipeline to predict the risk of cancer. Findings: Based on the pathogen-cancer detection pipeline, the Illumina platform showed 77·6% sensitivity and 97·6% specificity compared to the composite reference standard for infection diagnosis. However, the Nanopore platform showed 34·7% sensitivity and 98·7% specificity. mNGS identified more fungi, which was confirmed by subsequent pathological examination. M. tuberculosis complex was weakly detected. For cancer detection, compared with histology, the Illumina platform showed 83·7% sensitivity and 97·6% specificity, diagnosing an additional 36 cancer patients, of whom half had abnormal imaging findings (pulmonary shadow, space-occupying lesions, or nodules). Interpretation: For the first time, we have established a pipeline to simultaneously detect pathogens and cancer based on Illumina sequencing of lung biopsy tissue. This pipeline efficiently diagnosed cancer in patients with abnormal imaging findings. Funding: This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China and National Natural Science Foundation of China.

An acquired cholesteatoma generally occurs as a consequence of otitis media and eustachian tube dysfunction. Patients with acquired cholesteatoma generally present with chronic otorrhea and progressive conductive hearing loss. There are many microbes reportedly associated with acquired cholesteatoma. However, conventional culture-based techniques show a typically low detection rate for various pathogenetic bacteria and fungi. Metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS), an emerging powerful platform offering higher sensitivity and higher throughput for evaluating many samples at once, remains to be studied in acquired cholesteatoma. In this study, 16 consecutive patients from January 2020 to January 2021 at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine (SAHZU) were reviewed. We detected a total of 31 microbial species in patients, mNGS provided a higher detection rate compared to culture (100% vs. 31.25%, p = 0.000034). As the severity of the patient’s pathological condition worsens, the more complex types of microbes were identified. The most commonly detected microbial genus was Aspergillus (9/16, 56.25%), especially in patients suffering from severe bone erosion. In summary, mNGS improves the sensibility to identify pathogens of cholesteatoma patients, and Aspergillus infections increase bone destruction in acquired cholesteatoma.

With immense impact on coastal ecosystems' function, especially on nutrient cycle, Spartina alterniflora has become the most importantly invasive species in coastal wetland of China. However, the alternation of sulfur level and transformation between different inorganic sulfur (IS) fractions caused by the plant are poorly understood. In order to study the effect of S. alterniflora invasion and growth on soil IS components, we used space-for-time substitution method and examined a whole year dynamics of different sulfur components in 0–60 cm soil of S. alterniflora tidal flat and mudflat at Jiaozhou Bay. Results indicated S. alterniflora improved soil sulfur level and its bio-availability, increased the contents of soil TS, total inorganic sulfur (TIS) and all of the IS fractions except hydrochloric acid volatile sulfur (HVS). But only the rate of soil adsorbed sulfur (AS) to TIS raised following invasion. In addition, S. alterniflora elevated the accumulation sites of soil Hydrochloric acid soluble sulfur (HSS) and HVS from deep soil to rhizosphere in spring. Key impact factors on IS fractions altered as invasion from soil physicochemical factors to plant fctors. Further, S. alterniflora encouraged the transformation of sulfur state from precipitation (HSS, HVS) to dissolved (HS, AS). This implies that the plant induced to an elevation of sulfur provided capacity and a reduction of sulfur toxicity in soil, which has vitally ecological significance for its expansion in costal wetlands. Now, S. alterniflora has occupied large area mudflat and was competing for habitat with native species in Jiaozhou Bay.

SOX2 is an important stem cell marker and plays important roles in development and carcinogenesis. However, the role of SOX2 in Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition has not been investigated. We demonstrated, for the first time, that SOX2 is involved in the Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) process as knock downof SOX2 in colorectal cancer (CRC) SW620 cells induced a Mesenchymal-Epithelial Transition (MET) process with recognized changes in the expression of key genes involved in the EMT process including E-cadherin and vimentin. In addition, we provided a link between SOX2 activity and the WNT pathway by showing that knock down of SOX2 reduced the WNT pathway activity in colorectal cancer (CRC) cells. We further demonstrated that SOX2 is involved in cell migration and invasion in vitro and in metastasis in vivo for CRC cells, and that the process might be mediated through the MMP2 activity. Finally, an IHC analysis of 44 cases of colorectal cancer patients suggested that SOX2 is a prognosis marker for metastasis of colorectal cancers.

To evaluate the performance (evaluation grade) of a coach, we formulate metrics on five aspects: historical record, game gold content, playoff performance, honors and contribution to the sport. Moreover, each metric is subdivided into several secondary metrics, making for a three-tier hierarchical structure. Take playoff performance as an example: We collect post-season results (Sweet Sixteen, Final Four, etc.) each year from the NCAA official Website, fromWikimedia, and so on. First, we use the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine the weight of each metric on a coach's evaluation. Second, we use Fuzzy Synthetic Evaluation (FSE) to overcome the weakness of excessively subjective factors in AHP. The FSE model is based on data and generates a fuzzy matrix. After that, we apply the entropy method and linear weights to obtain the coaches' evaluation grades. To evaluate the accuracy of the two models, we define hit score to reflect the difference between our results and standard rankings from several authorities, such as ESPN and Sporting News. Take NCAA basketball as a case study: AHP receives a 78.8 hit score while FSE gets 81.8, which indicates that FSE performs better than AHP. Afterwards, we develop an Aggregation Model (AM) combining the two models based on hit score. The top 5 college basketball coaches, in order, are John Wooden, Mike Krzyzewski, Adolph Rupp, Dean Smith and Bob Knight. The time horizon does make a difference. According to turning points in NCAA history, we divide the previous century into six periods with different time weights, which leads to changes in the rankings. We apply our model to college women'sbasketball only to findthat gender does not matter. The model proves to be effective in other sports. The ranking of college football coaches is: Bear Bryant, Knute Rockne, Tom Osborne, Joe Paterno, Bobby Bowden; and the top 5 coaches in college hockey are Bob Johnson, Red Berenson, Jack Parker, Jerry York, Ron Mason. We conduct sensitivity analysis on FSE to find the best membership function and calculation rule, and also on the aggregation weight. We find that AMperforms better than eitherAHPor FSE alone. As a creative use, weapply AMto pick the top 3 U.S. presidents: Abraham Lincoln, GeorgeWashington, Franklin D. Roosevelt. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of our model and present a nontechnical explanation of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microgravity (MG) leads to a decrease in osteogenic potential of human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs). In the present study, we used large gradient high magnetic field (LGHMF) produced by a superconducting magnet to model MG (LGHMF-MG) and analyzed the effects of LGHMF-MG on survival, cytoskeleton and osteogenic potential of hMSCs. Results showed that the LGHMF-MG treatment for 6 h disrupted the cytoskeleton of hMSCs, and the LGHMF-MG treatment for 24 h led to cell death. LGHMF-MG treatments for 6 h in early stages of osteogenic induction (the pre-treatment before osteogenic induction, the beginning-treatment in the beginning-stage of osteogenic induction and the middle-treatment in the middle-stage of osteogenic induction) resulted in suppression on osteogenesis of hMSCs. The suppression intensity was reduced gradually as the treatment stage of LGHMF-MG was postponed. The LGHMF-MG treatment for 6 h in the ending-stage of osteogenic induction (the ending-treatment) had no obvious effect on osteogenesis of hMSCs. These results indicated that LGHMF-MG should affect the initiation of osteogenesis. Finally, the possible mechanism for the inhibition effect of LGHMF-MG on osteogenesis of hMSCs is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Acute Kidney Injury and Acute-on-Chronic Liver Failure Classifications in Prognosis Assessment of Patients With Acute Decompensation of Cirrhosis," by P. Angeli et al published in a 2015 issue.

Staphylococcus hominis is a commensal coagulase-negative species of staphylococci. It has been considered a presumptive and opportunistic pathogen that causes nosocomial infections in humans. Here we present the draft genome sequence of S. hominis ZBW5, a multidrug-resistant strain isolated from a human skin sample, which provides opportunities to understand the mechanism and genetic basis of its pathogenesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]