We demonstrate a fiber optic surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensor based on smart phone platforms. The light-weight optical components and sensing element are connected by optical fibers on a phone case. This SPR adaptor can be conveniently installed or removed from smart phones. The measurement, control and reference channels are illuminated by the light entering the lead-in fibers from the phone’s LED flash, while the light from the end faces of the lead-out fibers is detected by the phone’s camera. The SPR-sensing element is fabricated by a light-guiding silica capillary that is stripped off its cladding and coated with 50-nm gold film. Utilizing a smart application to extract the light intensity information from the camera images, the light intensities of each channel are recorded every 0.5 s with refractive index (RI) changes. The performance of the smart phone-based SPR platform for accurate and repeatable measurements was evaluated by detecting different concentrations of antibody binding to a functionalized sensing element, and the experiment results were validated through contrast experiments with a commercial SPR instrument. This cost-effective and portable SPR biosensor based on smart phones has many applications, such as medicine, health and environmental monitoring.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is frequently comorbid with other neurological disorders such as intellectual disability (ID) or global development delay (GDD) and epilepsy. The pathogenesis of ASD is complex. So far, studies have identified more than 1000 ASD risk genes. Most of them were also reported to relate with other neurological diseases, and only several of them have been confirmed as pathogenic genes for autism. Little is known about the roles of these risk genes in neurological diseases with ASD. In the present study, we recruited a cohort of 158 neurological disorder probands with 163 variants of 48 ASD risk genes. Of these, 50 individuals (31.6%) were diagnosed with ASD. In the ASD patient subset, we identified several rarely reported candidate genes including DOLK , USH2A , and HUWE1 . In a comparison of patients with neurological disorders with and without ASD, we found that ID/GDD was frequently comorbid with ASD whereas epilepsy was more common in the non-ASD group. Statistical analyses of all possible risk factors implicated that variants in synaptic genes, especially non-voltage-gated ion channel genes and in transcriptional and chromosome genes were related to ASD, but none of the investigated environmental factors was. Our results are useful for the future diagnosis and prognosis of patients with neurological disorders and emphasize the utility of genetic screening.

an integral part of advanced sensing technologies. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] Various optical principles, such as interference, scattering, total internal reflection, and surface plasmon resonance, are applied in designing fiberoptic (FO) sensors. [11][12][13][14][15][16][17] As an emerging FO device, nanostructured plasmonic FO sensors have attracted much attention due to their superior performance and peculiar properties. [18][19][20][21][22] As nanostructured plasmonic FO sensors feature the characteristics of both traditional FO sensors and plasmonic sensors, they exhibit unique advantages and can be used as powerful biochemical sensing tools or integrated photonic devices. [23][24][25] There have been many reports on the fabrication of plasmonic FO sensors based on metal nanostructures. [26] A simple approach is the use of metal nanoparticles to modify the side or end of the fiber to excite the surface plasmon resonance effect. [27][28][29] Although such methods have the advantages of low cost and simple preparation processes, they present some difficulties in structural control during the fabrication of nanostructures on optical fiber surfaces. In addition, sensors fabricated by these methods usually operate in visible wavebands, which lack an associated communications infrastructure. To overcome these inherent weaknesses, nanoimprint lithography, electronbeam lithography, focused ion beam approaches, reactive ion etching, two-photon polymerization, optical 3D µ-printing, laser erosion direct writing, and other technologies have been proposed and applied to manufacture controllable patterns on the fiber end face. [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42] However, these techniques always depend on expensive equipment, which leads to a high-cost and time-consuming production process. As alternative techniques, breath figure methodologies and nanosphere lithography have been employed to fabricate nanostructures on the optical fiber end face. [43,44] Although these methods are cost-effective and produce regular patterns, they have some potential drawbacks that need to be improved. For instance, ceramic ferrule is an essential part of the self-assembly process, which weakens the miniaturization advantage of the fiber probe. In addition, these methods still require professional operation and specialized equipment for the process steps, such as fiber polishing, spin coating, and plasma processing. In general, owing to the high cost, process complexity, and dependence on specialized equipment, hardly any ordinary laboratories fabricate plasmonic FO As an emerging and promising paradigm of nanophotonic "lab-on-a-chip" devices, plasmonic fiber-optic (FO) probes with nanopatterns suffer from high cost and a complex fabrication process, which keep them from becoming the preferred choice for most optical fiber sensing applications. In this paper, a nanopatterned FO probe is demonstrated to be a surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy substrate and a plasmonic biosensor through theoretical simulations and exp...

Background SYN1 encodes synapsin I, which is a neuronal phosphoprotein involving in regulating axonogenesis and synaptogenesis. Variants in the gene have been associated with X-linked neurodevelopmental disorders in recent years. Methods In the study, we reported two male patients with familial SYN1 variants related neurodevelopmental disorders from Asian population. Previously published cases with significant SYN1 variants from the literature were also included to analyze the phenotype and genotype of the disorder. Results Two maternally inherited SYN1 variants, including c.C1076A, p.T359K in proband A and c.C1444T, p. Q482X in proband B (NM_133499) were found, which have never been described in detail. Combining with our research, all reported probands were male in the condition, whose significant SYN1 variants were inherited from their asymptomatic or mild affected mother. Although the disorder encompasses three main clinical presentations: mental deficiency, easily controlled reflex seizure and behavior problems, patients’ clinical manifestations vary in genders and individuals, even in the same pedigree. Conclusion We firstly reported two familial SYN1-related neurodevelopmental disorders in Asian pediatric patients. Gender and phenotype differences should be highly valued in the disorder.

A compact multi-channel surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensor is demonstrated based on a tablet as the measurement platform. The SPR biosensor employs a bundle of fiber-optic SPR sensors as the multiplexed sensing elements that are illuminated by a light-emitting diode (LED) plane light source and detected by a cordless camera. The multi-channel SPR biosensor was based on optical fiber components for precise, label-free and high-throughput detection without the use of complex, specialized or fragile instrumentation that would require optical calibration. The reference and control channels compensated for the fluctuation of the LED light source and the bulk refractive index, increasing the accuracy and reliability of the biosensor. The multi-channel SPR biosensor was applied for multi-analyte biosensing of immunoglobulin G (IgG) and concanavalin A (Con A). The channels functionalized with staphylococcal protein A (SPA) and ribonuclease B (RNase B) only showed relative intensity responses to their corresponding analytes. Moreover, the multi-channel SPR sensors responded to the specific detection of IgG and Con A with an approximately linear relative intensity response to the analyte concentration. Hence, multiple analytes were simultaneously and quantitatively detected with the multi-channel SPR biosensor. This compact, cost-effective multi-channel SPR biosensor is adapted for point-of-care tests, which are important in healthcare and environmental monitoring and for biomolecular interaction analysis.

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Biomolecular detection at a low concentration is usually the most important criterion for biological measurement and early stage disease diagnosis. In this paper, a highly sensitive nanoplasmonic biosensing approach is demonstrated by achieving near-infrared plasmonic excitation on a continuous gold-coated nanotriangular array. Near-infrared incident light at a small incident angle excites surface plasmon resonance with much higher spectral sensitivity compared with traditional configuration, due to its greater interactive volume and the stronger electric field intensity. By introducing sharp nanotriangular metallic tips, intense localization of plasmonic near-fields is realized to enhance the molecular perception ability on sensing surface. This approach with an enhanced sensitivity (42103.8 nm per RIU) and a high figure of merit (367.812) achieves a direct assay of ssDNA at nanomolar level, which is a further step in label-free ultrasensitive sensing technique. Considerable improvement is recorded in the detection limit of ssDNA as 1.2 × 10 −18 m based on the coupling effect between nanotriangles and gold nanoparticles. This work combines high bulk-and surface-sensitivities, providing a simple way toward label-free ultralow-concentration biomolecular detection.

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