The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), outbreak from Wuhan City, Hubei province, China in 2019 has become an ongoing global health emergency. The emerging virus, SARS-CoV-2, causes coughing, fever, muscle ache, and shortness of breath or dyspnea in symptomatic patients. The pathogenic particles that are generated by coughing and sneezing remain suspended in the air or attach to a surface to facilitate transmission in an aerosol form. This review focuses on the recent trends in pandemic biology, diagnostics methods, prevention tools, and policies for COVID-19 management. To meet the growing demand for medical supplies during the COVID-19 era, a variety of personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators have been developed using do-it-yourself (DIY) manufacturing. COVID-19 diagnosis and the prediction of virus transmission are analyzed by machine learning algorithms, simulations, and digital monitoring. Until the discovery of a clinically approved vaccine for COVID-19, pandemics remain a public concern. Therefore, technological developments, biomedical research, and policy development are needed to decipher the coronavirus mechanism and epidemiological characteristics, prevent transmission, and develop therapeutic drugs.

3D visualization technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) have gained popularity in the recent decade. Digital extended reality (XR) technologies have been adopted in various domains ranging from entertainment to education because of their accessibility and affordability. XR modalities create an immersive experience, enabling 3D visualization of the content without a conventional 2D display constraint. Here, we provide a perspective on XR in current biomedical applications and demonstrate case studies using cell biology concepts, multiplexed proteomics images, surgical data for heart operations, and cardiac 3D models. Emerging challenges associated with XR technologies in the context of adverse health effects and a cost comparison of distinct platforms are discussed. The presented XR platforms will be useful for biomedical education, medical training, surgical guidance, and molecular data visualization to enhance trainees' and students' learning, medical operation accuracy, and the comprehensibility of complex biological systems.

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Conventional posters are effective in disseminating progress reports in scientific meetings, but they fail to deliver the need for visualization of dynamic biological data and become costly with the increasing number of conferences and the reprinting needs for emerging research. Here we present digital posters that repurpose digital frames from the art community and experiment with multiplexed imaging movies of cells as a demonstration of the digital poster concept, providing an interactive and low-cost tool for next-generation sharing platforms.

Organelles play important roles in human health and disease, such as maintaining homeostasis, regulating growth and aging, and generating energy. Organelle diversity in cells not only exists between cell types but also between individual cells. Therefore, studying the distribution of organelles at the single-cell level is important to understand cellular function. Mesenchymal stem cells are multipotent cells that have been explored as a therapeutic method for treating a variety of diseases. Studying how organelles are structured in these cells can answer questions about their characteristics and potential. Herein, rapid multiplexed immunofluorescence (RapMIF) was performed to understand the spatial organization of 10 organelle proteins and the interactions between them in the bone marrow (BM) and umbilical cord (UC) mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). Spatial correlations, colocalization, clustering, statistical tests, texture, and morphological analyses were conducted at the single cell level, shedding light onto the interrelations between the organelles and comparisons of the two MSC subtypes. Such analytics toolsets indicated that UC MSCs exhibited higher organelle expression and spatially spread distribution of mitochondria accompanied by several other organelles compared to BM MSCs. This data-driven single-cell approach provided by rapid subcellular proteomic imaging enables personalized stem cell therapeutics.

BACKGROUND As global populations age and become susceptible to neurodegenerative illnesses, new therapies for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) are urgently needed. Existing data resources for drug discovery and repurposing fail to capture heterogeneous biomedical knowledge that is central to the disease’s etiology and response to drugs. We designed the Alzheimer’s Knowledge Base (AlzKB) to alleviate this need by providing a comprehensive knowledge representation of AD etiology and candidate therapeutics. OBJECTIVE We designed the Alzheimer’s Knowledge Base (AlzKB) to alleviate this need by providing a comprehensive knowledge representation of AD etiology and candidate therapeutics. METHODS We designed AlzKB as a large, heterogeneous graph knowledge base assembled using 22 diverse external data sources describing biological and pharmaceutical entities at different levels of organization (chemicals, genes, anatomy, diseases, etc.). AlzKB uses an OWL 2 ontology to enforce semantic consistency and allow for ontological inference. We provide a public version of AlzKB and allow users to run and modify local versions of the knowledge base. RESULTS AlzKB is freely available at http://alzkb.ai, and currently contains 118,902 entities with 1,309,527 relationships between those entities. To demonstrate its value, we use graph data science and machine learning to (a.) propose new therapeutic targets based on similarities of AD to Parkinson Disease and (b.) repurpose existing drugs that may treat AD. For each use case, AlzKB recovers known therapeutic associations while proposing biologically plausible new ones. CONCLUSIONS AlzKB is a new, publicly available knowledge resource that enables researchers to discover complex translational associations for AD drug discovery. Through two use-cases, we show that it is a valuable tool for proposing novel therapeutic hypotheses based on public biomedical knowledge.

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