The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is paramount in nucleic acid amplification testing, and for many assays, the use of PCR or qPCR is considered the ‘gold standard’. While instrumentation for...
Audio magnetic tapes manufactured using polyester urethane are known to become nonplayable over time due to the degradation of the magnetic layer. Attempting to play degraded tapes to digitize them can cause extensive damage to the tape as well as to the play back device. For this reason, most of the magnetic tapes in cultural heritage institutions are in critical state. The purpose of our study is to preserve historical recordings in magnetic tapes by developing a nondestructive technique to determine degradation status. Our approach is to combine attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR FT‐IR) with chemometric techniques, especially neural networks and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso). The model built using neural networking was able to successfully classify playable and nonplayable with 97% to 98% accuracy when similar tape brands/models were in the training and the test set. With different brands/models in the test set, neural network model performed poorly. However, Lasso showed 95.5% accuracy for similar brand/models and 80.5% accuracy for different tape brands/models. This suggests that Lasso is the better technique to determine if a tape is degraded or not.
As COVID-19 transmission control measures are gradually being lifted, a sensitive and rapid diagnostic method for large-scale screening could prove essential for monitoring population infection rates. However, many rapid workflows for SARS-CoV-2 detection and diagnosis are not amenable to the analysis of large-volume samples. Previously, our group demonstrated a technique for SARS-CoV-2 nanoparticle-facilitated enrichment and enzymatic lysis from clinical samples in under 10 min. Here, this sample preparation strategy was applied to pooled samples originating from nasopharyngeal (NP) swabs eluted in viral transport medium (VTM) and saliva samples diluted up to 1:100. This preparation method was coupled with conventional RT-PCR on gold-standard instrumentation for proof-of-concept. Additionally, real-time PCR analysis was conducted using an in-house, ultra-rapid real-time microfluidic instrument paired with an experimentally optimized rapid protocol. Following pooling and extraction from clinical samples, average cycle threshold (CT) values from resultant eluates generally increased as the pooling dilution factor increased; further, results from a double-blind study demonstrated 100% concordance with clinical values. In addition, preliminary data obtained from amplification of eluates prepared by this technique and analyzed using our portable, ultra-rapid real-time microfluidic PCR amplification instrument showed progress toward a streamlined method for rapid SARS-CoV-2 analysis from pooled samples.
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