We describe a suite of software modules to store, retrieve and display carbohydrate microarray data. Storage is in a relational database that holds all the microarray data and associated glycan, protein and experimental information. The retrieval and display software has a comprehensive system of sorters, filters and arrangers to allow highly customized presentation of data as charts, tables, 2...

BACKGROUND Discrimination of stem cells with flow cytometric analysis of Hoechst 33342 efflux by the ABCG2 transporter (termed the Hoechst side population, or SP technique) is a valuable methodology for identifying bone marrow progenitors enriched with stem cells. Unfortunately, it requires a ultraviolet (UV) laser source, usually necessitating an expensive and maintenance-intensive argon- or k...

Microfluidic diagnostic devices promise faster disease identification by purifying and concentrating low-abundance analytes from a flowing sample. The diagnosis of sepsis, a whole body inflammatory response often caused by microbial infections of the blood, is a model system for pursuing the advantages of microfluidic devices over traditional diagnostic protocols. Traditional sepsis diagnoses r...

Current spike sorting methods focus on clustering neurons' characteristic spike waveforms. The resulting spike-sorted data are typically used to estimate how covariates of interest modulate the firing rates of neurons. However, when these covariates do modulate the firing rates, they provide information about spikes' identities, which thus far have been ignored for the purpose of spike sorting....

Kinesin-driven microtubules have been a focus to serve as molecular shuttles to replace multiple on-chip functions in micro total analysis systems (μTAS). Although transport, concentration, and detection of target molecules have been demonstrated, controllability of transport directions is still a major challenge. To define multiple moving directions for selective molecular transport, we integr...

Software systems generally suffer from a certain fragility in the face of “disturbances” such as bugs, unforseen user input, unmodeled interactions with other software components, and so on. A single such disturbance can make the machine on which the software is executing hang or crash. What seems to be required to address this fragility is a general means of using feedback to stabilize these s...

BACKGROUND Containment of potentially biohazardous aerosols that result from high-speed sorting of human cells has been an increasingly important problem in analytical cytometry. The current method for assessing the efficiency of aerosol containment involves detection of aerosols containing sorted T4 bacteriophage on lawns of T4-susceptible Escherichia coli on plates that are placed in and arou...

Introduction I t is not possible to eliminate near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy as an analytical technique from our modern daily life. Flinn describes this very comprehensively and includes various application examples of NIR spectroscopy in his article titled “An average day (or how near infrared affects daily life)” in 2005. Applications of NIR spectroscopy in the minerals processing industry ...

To investigate mechanisms of apical sorting in the secretory pathway of epithelial cells, we expressed varying amounts of the 165 amino acid isoform of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF(165)) and transforming growth factor beta1 (TGF-beta1) via replication defective adenoviruses. Apical sorting of both proteins was efficient at low expression levels but saturated or was reversed at high ...

The functioning of living cells requires efficient and selective transport of materials into and out of the cell, and between different cellular compartments. Much of this transport occurs through nano-scale channels that do not require large scale molecular re-arrangements (such as transition from a 'closed' to an 'open' state) and do not require a direct input of metabolic energy during trans...