No abstract

No abstract

Clustering based on clinicophysiologic parameters yielded 4 stable and reproducible clusters that associate with different pathobiological pathways.

Inflammatory lung diseases are highly complex in respect of pathogenesis and relationships between inflammation, clinical disease and response to treatment. Sophisticated large-scale analytical methods to quantify gene expression (transcriptomics), proteins (proteomics), lipids (lipidomics) and metabolites (metabolomics) in the lungs, blood and urine are now available to identify biomarkers that define disease in terms of combined clinical, physiological and patho-biological abnormalities. The aspiration is that these approaches will improve diagnosis, i.e. define pathological phenotypes, and facilitate the monitoring of disease and therapy, and also, unravel underlying molecular pathways. Biomarker studies can either select predefined biomarker(s) measured by specific methods or apply an ''unbiased'' approach involving detection platforms that are indiscriminate in focus. This article reviews the technologies presently available to study biomarkers of lung disease within the 'omics field. The contributions of the individual 'omics analytical platforms to the field of respiratory diseases are summarised, with the goal of providing background on their respective abilities to contribute to systems medicine-based studies of lung disease. @ERSpublications Summary of the application of 'omics-based analytical platforms for biomarker discovery in inflammatory lung diseases

The history of the development of potentiometric sensors over the past century demonstrates progress in constructing single, discrete (i.e., separate, to distinguish from sensor arrays) ion sensors, which have been made as selective as possible. Only a few types reveal high selectivity. However, easy measurement procedure, with low cost and availability, give rise to the search for new ways for their successful application. The present document describes a new concept for application of potentiometric multisensor systems, viz., sensor arrays for solution analysis, and the performance of this new analytical tool - the "electronic tongue". The electronic tongue is a multisensor system, which consists of a number of low-selective sensors and uses advanced mathematical procedures for signal processing based on the pattern recognition (PARC) and/or multivariate analysis [artificial neural networks (ANNs), principal component analysis (PCA), etc.]. Definitions of the multisensor systems and their parameters are suggested. Results from the application of the electronic tongue, both for quantitative and qualitative analysis of different mineral water and wine samples, are presented and discussed.

In this work we analyze the coupled piezoelectric and semiconductive behavior of vertically aligned ZnO nanowires under uniform compression. The screening effect on the piezoelectric field caused by the free carriers in vertically compressed zinc oxide nanowires (NWs) has been computed by means of both analytical considerations and finite element calculations. We predict that, for typical geometries and donor concentrations, the length of the NW does not significantly influence the maximum output piezopotential because the potential mainly drops across the tip, so that relatively short NWs can be sufficient for high-efficiency nanogenerators, which is an important result for wet-chemistry fabrication of low-cost, CMOS- or MEMS-compatible nanogenerators. Furthermore, simulations reveal that the dielectric surrounding the NW influences the output piezopotential, especially for low donor concentrations. Other parameters such as the applied force, the sectional area and the donor concentration have been varied in order to understand their effects on the output voltage of the nanogenerator.

No abstract

No abstract