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A blended bimolecular exciplex formation was demonstrated between two individual donor and acceptor molecules, which are tris(4-carbazoyl-9-ylphenyl)amine (TCTA) and 2,4,6-tris(3'-(pyridin-3-yl)biphenyl-3-yl)-1,3,5-triazine (Tm3PyBPZ). The photoluminescence spectrum of the exciplex in the solid state showed an emission with a peak around 514 nm (∼2.49 eV). By applying this exciplex as an emitting layer, a highly efficient all-fluorescent organic lighting emitting diode with maximum efficiencies of 13.1% and 53.4 lm/W can be realized under an extremely low turn-on voltage of only 2.4 V. The thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) process is believed to be responsible for the excellent device performance.

Metagenome assembly is an efficient approach to reconstruct microbial genomes from metagenomic sequencing data. Although short-read sequencing has been widely used for metagenome assembly, linked- and long-read sequencing have shown their advancements in assembly by providing long-range DNA connectedness. Many metagenome assembly tools were developed to simplify the assembly graphs and resolve the repeats in microbial genomes. However, there remains no comprehensive evaluation of metagenomic sequencing technologies, and there is a lack of practical guidance on selecting the appropriate metagenome assembly tools. This paper presents a comprehensive benchmark of 19 commonly used assembly tools applied to metagenomic sequencing datasets obtained from simulation, mock communities or human gut microbiomes. These datasets were generated using mainstream sequencing platforms, such as Illumina and BGISEQ short-read sequencing, 10x Genomics linked-read sequencing, and PacBio and Oxford Nanopore long-read sequencing. The assembly tools were extensively evaluated against many criteria, which revealed that long-read assemblers generated high contig contiguity but failed to reveal some medium- and high-quality metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs). Linked-read assemblers obtained the highest number of overall near-complete MAGs from the human gut microbiomes. Hybrid assemblers using both short- and long-read sequencing were promising methods to improve both total assembly length and the number of near-complete MAGs. This paper also discussed the running time and peak memory consumption of these assembly tools and provided practical guidance on selecting them.

Thermally activated delayed florescence (TADF) materials can be an efficient host in organic LED (OLED). It is because it is possible to couple energetically the emission energy level of a dopant to the energy levels in the TADF material. In this work fluorescent emitters 2,3,6,7-tetrahydro-1,1,7,7,-tetramethyl-1H,5 H,11H-10-(2-benzothiazolyl)quinolizino-9,9a,1gh coumarin (c545t) and 5,6,11,12-tetraphenyltetracene (rubrene) were used as dopants in a blended TADF host; tris(4-carbazoyl-9-ylphenyl)amine (TCTA) with 2,4,6-tris(3′-(pyridin-3-yl)biphenyl-3-yl)-1,3,5-triazine (Tm3PyBPZ). The blended TADF host has an energy difference between the singlet and triplet excited states (ΔEST) around 27 meV with the yield of reverse intersystem crossing (ФRISC) nearly 100%. This high ФRISC yield enhances the OLED performance with the c545t doped OLED having 11.9% external quantum efficiency and 10% for the rubrene doped OLED.

Background The human microbiota are complex systems with important roles in our physiological activities and diseases. Sequencing the microbial genomes in the microbiota can help in our interpretation of their activities. The vast majority of the microbes in the microbiota cannot be isolated for individual sequencing. Current metagenomics practices use short-read sequencing to simultaneously sequence a mixture of microbial genomes. However, these results are in ambiguity during genome assembly, leading to unsatisfactory microbial genome completeness and contig continuity. Linked-read sequencing is able to remove some of these ambiguities by attaching the same barcode to the reads from a long DNA fragment (10–100 kb), thus improving metagenome assembly. However, it is not clear how the choices for several parameters in the use of linked-read sequencing affect the assembly quality. Results We first examined the effects of read depth (C) on metagenome assembly from linked-reads in simulated data and a mock community. The results showed that C positively correlated with the length of assembled sequences but had little effect on their qualities. The latter observation was corroborated by tests using real data from the human gut microbiome, where C demonstrated minor impact on the sequence quality as well as on the proportion of bins annotated as draft genomes. On the other hand, metagenome assembly quality was susceptible to read depth per fragment (CR) and DNA fragment physical depth (CF). For the same C, deeper CR resulted in more draft genomes while deeper CF improved the quality of the draft genomes. We also found that average fragment length (μFL) had marginal effect on assemblies, while fragments per partition (NF/P) impacted the off-target reads involved in local assembly, namely, lower NF/P values would lead to better assemblies by reducing the ambiguities of the off-target reads. In general, the use of linked-reads improved the assembly for contig N50 when compared to Illumina short-reads, but not when compared to PacBio CCS (circular consensus sequencing) long-reads. Conclusions We investigated the influence of linked-read sequencing parameters on metagenome assembly comprehensively. While the quality of genome assembly from linked-reads cannot rival that from PacBio CCS long-reads, the case for using linked-read sequencing remains persuasive due to its low cost and high base-quality. Our study revealed that the probable best practice in using linked-reads for metagenome assembly was to merge the linked-reads from multiple libraries, where each had sufficient CR but a smaller amount of input DNA.

Background Due to the complexity of microbial communities, de novo assembly on next generation sequencing data is commonly unable to produce complete microbial genomes. Metagenome assembly binning becomes an essential step that could group the fragmented contigs into clusters to represent microbial genomes based on contigs’ nucleotide compositions and read depths. These features work well on the long contigs, but are not stable for the short ones. Contigs can be linked by sequence overlap (assembly graph) or by the paired-end reads aligned to them (PE graph), where the linked contigs have high chance to be derived from the same clusters. Results We developed METAMVGL, a multi-view graph-based metagenomic contig binning algorithm by integrating both assembly and PE graphs. It could strikingly rescue the short contigs and correct the binning errors from dead ends. METAMVGL learns the two graphs’ weights automatically and predicts the contig labels in a uniform multi-view label propagation framework. In experiments, we observed METAMVGL made use of significantly more high-confidence edges from the combined graph and linked dead ends to the main graph. It also outperformed many state-of-the-art contig binning algorithms, including MaxBin2, MetaBAT2, MyCC, CONCOCT, SolidBin and GraphBin on the metagenomic sequencing data from simulation, two mock communities and Sharon infant fecal samples. Conclusions Our findings demonstrate METAMVGL outstandingly improves the short contig binning and outperforms the other existing contig binning tools on the metagenomic sequencing data from simulation, mock communities and infant fecal samples.

Structural variants (SVs) in a personal genome are important but, for all practical purposes, impossible to detect comprehensively by standard short-fragment sequencing. De novo assembly, traditionally used to generate reference genomes, offers an alternative means for variant detection and phasing but has not been applied broadly to human genomes because of fundamental limitations of short-fragment approaches and high cost of long-read technologies. We here show that 10x linked-read sequencing, which has been applied to assemble human diploid genomes into high quality contigs, supports accurate SV detection.We examined variants in six de novo 10x assemblies with diverse experimental parameters from two commonly used human cell lines, NA12878 and NA24385. The assemblies are effective in detecting mid-size SVs, which were discovered by simple pairwise alignment of the assemblies' contigs to the reference (hg38). Our study also shows that the accuracy of SV breakpoint at base-pair level is high, with a majority (80% for deletion and 70% for insertion) of SVs having precisely correct sizes and breakpoints (<2bp difference). Finally, setting the ancestral state of SV loci by comparing to ape orthologs allows inference of the actual molecular mechanism (insertion or deletion) causing the mutation, which in about half of cases is opposite to that of the reference-based call. Interestingly, we uncover 214 SVs that may have been maintained as polymorphisms in the human lineage since before our divergence from chimp. Overall, we show that de novo assembly of 10x linked-read data can achieve cost-effective SV detection for personal genomes.