Biosensors are emerging as efficient (sensitive and selective) and affordable analytical diagnostic tools for early-stage disease detection, as required for personalized health wellness management. Low-level detection of a targeted disease biomarker (pM level) has emerged extremely useful to evaluate the progression of disease under therapy. Such collected bioinformatics and its multi-aspects-oriented analytics is in demand to explore the effectiveness of a prescribed treatment, optimize therapy, and correlate biomarker level with disease pathogenesis. Owing to nanotechnology-enabled advancements in sensing unit fabrication, device integration, interfacing, packaging, and sensing performance at point-of-care (POC) has rendered diagnostics according to the requirements of disease management and patient disease profile i.e. in a personalized manner. Efforts are continuously being made to promote the state of art biosensing technology as a next-generation non-invasive disease diagnostics methodology. Keeping this in view, this progressive opinion article describes personalized health care management related analytical tools which can provide access to better health for everyone, with overreaching aim to manage healthy tomorrow timely. Considering accomplishments and predictions, such affordable intelligent diagnostics tools are urgently required to manage COVID-19 pandemic, a life-threatening respiratory infectious disease, where a rapid, selective and sensitive detection of human beta severe acute respiratory system coronavirus (SARS-COoV-2) protein is the key factor.

The oxidation of NO over Brønsted acid sites in chabazite (CHA) zeolites shows an atypical temperature dependence; at low temperature the apparent activation energy is negative, but it becomes positive as the temperature exceeds a transition temperature. To explain this behavior we used density functional theory and statistical mechanics to investigate high and low temperature mechanisms for this reaction and propose a dynamic active site change in response to temperature variation. Our simulations show that the apparent activation barrier in the low temperature regime is more negative over Brønsted acidic CHA as compared to the siliceous zeolite framework. This effect is attributed to further enthalpic stabilization of the transition states by physical interaction with the H-CHA Brønsted acid sites. At elevated temperature, our calculations support both the existence and the significant catalytic role of NO+ in providing a modified active site. The temperature dependent transformation of the active site from H-CHA to NO-CHA sites may occur via two plausible ion-exchange mechanisms that define a transition temperature for the reaction. This transition temperature can be tuned by incorporating different trivalent metal atoms (B, Al, Ga or In) within the CHA framework. We found the lowest transition temperature for H-[In]CHA and H-[Ga]CHA. The ability to control the dynamic response of the active site and the associated switch between low and high temperature mechanism with negative and positive apparent activation energy, respectively, is of fundamental interest for the design of zeolite catalysts operating in the presence of NO.

The arrangement of organic molecules at the donor-acceptor interface in an organic photovoltaic (OPV) cell can have a strong effect on the generation of charge carriers and thereby cell performance. In this paper, we report the molecular-level exploration of the ensemble of interfacial donor-acceptor pair geometries and the charge-transfer (CT) rates to which they give rise. Our approach combines molecular-dynamics simulations, electronic structure calculations, machine learning, and rate theory. This approach is applied to the boron subphthalocyanine chloride (donor) and C60 (acceptor) OPV system. We find that the interface is dominated by a previously unreported donor-acceptor pair edge geometry, which contributes significantly to device performance in a manner that depends on the initial conditions. Quantitative relations between the morphology and CT rates are established, which can be used to advance the design of more efficient OPV devices.

This Methods/Protocols article is intended for materials scientists interested in performing machine learning-centered research. We cover broad guidelines and best practices regarding the obtaining and treatment of data, feature engineering, model training, validation, evaluation and comparison, popular repositories for materials data and benchmarking data sets, model and architecture sharing, and finally publication. In addition, we include interactive Jupyter notebooks with example Python code to demonstrate some of the concepts, workflows, and best practices discussed. Overall, the data-driven methods and machine learning workflows and considerations are presented in a simple way, allowing interested readers to more intelligently guide their machine learning research using the suggested references, best practices, and their own materials domain expertise.

In a review in this issue of Annals, Kueper et al have uncovered one such zone at the interface between computer science and primary care by describing a collection of research that has been hiding in plain sight since 1986. By connecting 2 disciplines, these 405 articles constitute an area of focus—primary care artificial intelligence—that may be new to primary care researchers but has already generated an impressive compilation.

Despite this body of work, primary care artificial intelligence has failed to transform primary care due to a lack of engagement from the primary care community. Similar to health information technology, primary care artificial intelligence should aim to improve care delivery and health outcomes; using this benchmark, it has yet to make an impact. Even though its history spans 4 decades, primary care artificial intelligence remains in the “early stages of maturity” because few tools have been implemented. Changing primary care is difficult when only 1 out of every 7 of these papers includes a primary care author.2 Without input from primary care, these teams may fail to grasp the context of primary care data collection, its role within the health system, and the forces shaping its evolution.

In this work, we aim to update the understanding of how impurity or promoter metals segregate on metal surfaces, particularly in the application of single-atom alloys (SAA) for catalysis. Using density functional theory, we calculated the relative stability of the idealized SAA relative to subsurface, dimer, and adatom configurations to determine the tendency of the promoter atom to diffuse into the bulk, form surface clusters, or avoid alloying with the host, respectively. We selected 26 d-block metals augmented with Al and Pb to create a 28 × 28 database that indicates a total of 250 combinations for which the SAA configuration is most stable, and an additional 358 systems for which the SAA geometry is within 0.5 eV of the most stable configuration. We classified the data using decision tree, support vector machine, and neural network machine learning algorithms with tabulated atomic properties as the input vector. These black box approaches are unable to extrapolate to other possible geometries, which was circumvented by redefining the stability problem as a regression. We propose a physical bond counting model to formulate intuitive criteria for the formation of stable SAAs. The accuracy is then improved by using the bonding configuration and tabulated atomic properties with a kernel ridge regression (KRR) algorithm. The hybrid KRR model correctly identifies 190 SAAs with 85 false positives. Importantly, its physical basis allows the hybrid model to extend to similar geometries not included in the training data, thereby expanding the domain where the model is useful.

In this work, we aim to update the understanding of how impurity or promoter metals segregate on metal surfaces, particularly in the application of single-atom alloys (SAA) for catalysis. Using density functional theory, we calculated the relative stability of the idealized SAA relative to subsurface, dimer, and adatom configurations to determine the tendency of the promoter atom to diffuse into the bulk, form surface clusters, or avoid alloying with the host, respectively. We selected 26 d-block metals augmented with Al and Pb to create a 28 × 28 database that indicates a total of 250 combinations for which the SAA configuration is most stable, and an additional 358 systems for which the SAA geometry is within 0.5 eV of the most stable configuration. We classified the data using decision tree, support vector machine, and neural network machine learning algorithms with tabulated atomic properties as the input vector. These black box approaches are unable to extrapolate to other possible geometries, which was circumvented by redefining the stability problem as a regression. We propose a physical bond counting model to formulate intuitive criteria for the formation of stable SAAs. The accuracy is then improved by using the bonding configuration and tabulated atomic properties with a kernel ridge regression (KRR) algorithm. The hybrid KRR model correctly identifies 190 SAAs with 85 false positives. Importantly, its physical basis allows the hybrid model to extend to similar geometries not included in the training data, thereby expanding the domain where the model is useful.

Sex chromosomes and sex determining genes can evolve fast, with the sex-linked chromosomes often differing between closely related species. Population genetics theory has been developed and tested to explain the rapid evolution of sex chromosomes and sex determination. However, we do not know why the sex chromosomes are divergent in some taxa and conserved in others. Addressing this question requires comparing closely related taxa with conserved and divergent sex chromosomes to identify biological features that could explain these differences. Cytological karyotypes suggest that muscid flies (e.g., house fly) and blow flies are such a taxonomic pair. The sex chromosomes appear to differ across muscid species, whereas they are conserved across blow flies. Despite the cytological evidence, we do not know the extent to which muscid sex chromosomes are independently derived along different evolutionary lineages. To address that question, we used genomic and transcriptomic sequence data to identify young sex chromosomes in two closely related muscid species, horn fly (Haematobia irritans) and stable fly (Stomoxys calcitrans). We provide evidence that the nascent sex chromosomes of horn fly and stable fly were derived independently from each other and from the young sex chromosomes of the closely related house fly (Musca domestica). We present three different scenarios that could have given rise to the sex chromosomes of horn fly and stable fly, and we describe how the scenarios could be distinguished. Distinguishing between these scenarios in future work could identify features of muscid genomes that promote sex chromosome divergence.

We have developed a computational method of atomistically refining the structural ensemble of intrinsically disordered peptides (IDPs) facilitated by experimental measurements using circular dichroism spectroscopy (CD). A major challenge surrounding this approach stems from the deconvolution of experimental CD spectra into secondary structure features of the IDP ensemble. Currently available algorithms for CD deconvolution were designed to analyze the spectra of proteins with stable secondary structures. Herein, our work aims to minimize any bias from the peptide deconvolution analysis by implementing a non-negative linear least-squares fitting algorithm in conjunction with a CD reference data set that contains soluble and denatured proteins (SDP48). The non-negative linear least-squares method yields the best results for deconvolution of proteins with higher disordered content than currently available methods, according to a validation analysis of a set of protein spectra with Protein Data Bank entries. We subsequently used this analysis to deconvolute our experimental CD data to refine our computational model of the peptide secondary structure ensemble produced by all-atom molecular dynamics simulations with implicit solvent. We applied this approach to determine the ensemble structures of a set of short IDPs, that mimic the calmodulin binding domain of calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II and its 1-amino-acid and 3-amino-acid mutants. Our study offers a, to our knowledge, novel way to solve the ensemble secondary structures of IDPs in solution, which is important to advance the understanding of their roles in regulating signaling pathways through the formation of complexes with multiple partners.

Artificial intelligence (AI) for the purpose of this review is an umbrella term for technologies emulating a nephropathologist’s ability to extract information on diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy responsiveness from native or transplant kidney biopsies. Although AI can be used to analyze a wide variety of biopsy-related data, this review focuses on whole slide images traditionally used in nephropathology. AI applications in nephropathology have recently become available through several advancing technologies, including (i) widespread introduction of glass slide scanners, (ii) data servers in pathology departments worldwide, and (iii) through greatly improved computer hardware to enable AI training. In this review, we explain how AI can enhance the reproducibility of nephropathology results for certain parameters in the context of precision medicine using advanced architectures, such as convolutional neural networks, that are currently the state of the art in machine learning software for this task. Because AI applications in nephropathology are still in their infancy, we show the power and potential of AI applications mostly in the example of oncopathology. Moreover, we discuss the technological obstacles as well as the current stakeholder and regulatory concerns about developing AI applications in nephropathology from the perspective of nephropathologists and the wider nephrology community. We expect the gradual introduction of these technologies into routine diagnostics and research for selective tasks, suggesting that this technology will enhance the performance of nephropathologists rather than making them redundant.