Cobalt is a well-established inducer of hypoxia-like responses, which can cause gene modulation at the hypoxia inducible factor pathway to induce erythropoietin transcription. Cobalt salts are orally active, inexpensive, and easily accessible. It is an attractive blood doping agent for enhancing aerobic performance. Indeed, recent intelligence and investigations have confirmed cobalt was being abused in equine sports. In this paper, population surveys of total cobalt in raceday samples were conducted using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Urinary threshold of 75 ng/mL and plasma threshold of 2 ng/mL could be proposed for the control of cobalt misuse in raceday or in-competition samples. Results from administration trials with cobalt-containing supplements showed that common supplements could elevate urinary and plasma cobalt levels above the proposed thresholds within 24 h of administration. It would therefore be necessary to ban the use of cobalt-containing supplements on raceday as well as on the day before racing in order to implement and enforce the proposed thresholds. Since the abuse with huge quantities of cobalt salts can be done during training while the use of legitimate cobalt-containing supplements are also allowed, different urinary and plasma cobalt thresholds would be required to control cobalt abuse in non-raceday or out-of-competition samples. This could be achieved by setting the thresholds above the maximum urinary and plasma cobalt concentrations observed or anticipated from the normal use of legitimate cobalt-containing supplements. Urinary threshold of 2000 ng/mL and plasma threshold of 10 ng/mL were thus proposed for the control of cobalt abuse in non-raceday or out-of-competition samples.

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MicroRNAs (miRNAs) express differently in normal and cancerous tissues and thus are regarded as potent cancer biomarkers for early diagnosis. However, the short length and low abundance of miRNAs have brought challenges to the established detection assay in terms of sensitivity and selectivity. In this work, we present a novel miRNA detection assay in single-molecule level with total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (TIRFM). It is a solution-based hybridization detection system that does not require pretreatment steps such as sample enrichment or signal amplification. The hsa-miR-21 (miR-21) is chosen as target miRNA for its significant elevated content in a variety of cancers as reported previously. Herein, probes of complementary single-stranded oligonucleotide were hybridized in solution to miR-21 and labeled with fluorescent dye YOYO-1. The fluorescent hybrids were imaged by an electron-multiplying charge-coupled device (EMCCD) coupled TIRFM system and quantified by single-molecule counting. This single molecule detection (SMD) assay shows a good correlation between the number of molecules detected and the factual concentration of miRNA. The detection assay is applied to quantify the miR-21 in extracted total RNA samples of cancerous MCF-7 cells, HepG2 cells, and normal HUVEC cells, respectively. The results agreed very well with those from the prevalent real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) analysis. This assay is of high potential for applications in miRNA expression profiling and early cancer diagnosis.

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