Current screening methods towards prostate cancer (PCa) are not without limitations. Research work has been on-going to assess if there are other better tests suitable for primary or secondary screening of PCa to supplement the serum prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, which fails to work accurately in a grey zone of 4-10ng/ml. In this pilot study, the potential roles of urinary polyamines as prostate cancer biomarkers were evaluated. PCa, benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) patients and healthy controls (HC) showing PSA>4.0ng/ml were enrolled in the study. Their urine samples were obtained, and the urinary levels of putrescine (Put), spermidine (Spd) and spermine (Spm) were determined by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled with triple quadrupole mass spectrometer (UPLC-MS/MS). Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve and Student’s t-test were used to evaluate their diagnostic accuracies. Among the three biogenic polyamines, Spm had demonstrated a good diagnostic performance when comparing their levels in PCa patients with BPH patients (1.47 in PCa vs 5.87 in BPH; p<0.0001). Results are in accordance with transrectal ultrasound prostatic biopsy (TRUSPB) results, with an area under curve (AUC) value of 0.83±0.03. Therefore urinary Spm shows potential to serve as a novel PCa diagnostic biomarker, which in turn can help to address the limited sensitivity and specificity problem of serum PSA test.

A novel responsive europium-based luminescence “off–on” gate for the in situ detection of H2S in water was developed.

Epstein–Barr nuclear antigen 1 (EBNA1) plays a vital role in the maintenance of the viral genome and is the only viral protein expressed in nearly all forms of Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) latency and EBV-associated diseases, including numerous cancer types. To our knowledge, no specific agent against EBV genes or proteins has been established to target EBV lytic reactivation. Here we report an EBNA1- and Zn2+-responsive probe (ZRL5P4) which alone could reactivate the EBV lytic cycle through specific disruption of EBNA1. We have utilized the Zn2+chelator to further interfere with the higher order of EBNA1 self-association. The bioprobe ZRL5P4can respond independently to its interactions with Zn2+and EBNA1 with different fluorescence changes. It can selectively enter the nuclei of EBV-positive cells and disrupt the oligomerization andoriP-enhanced transactivation of EBNA1. ZRL5P4can also specifically enhance Dicer1 and PML expression, molecular events which had been reported to occur after the depletion of EBNA1 expression. Importantly, we found that treatment with ZRL5P4alone could reactivate EBV lytic induction by expressing the early and late EBV lytic genes/proteins. Lytic induction is likely mediated by disruption of EBNA1 oligomerization and the subsequent change of Dicer1 expression. Our probe ZRL5P4is an EBV protein-specific agent that potently reactivates EBV from latency, leading to the shrinkage of EBV-positive tumors, and our study also suggests the association of EBNA1 oligomerization with the maintenance of EBV latency.

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Stable, tumor-specific and pH-responsive gold nanoparticles are carefully designed for aggregation-induced photoacoustic in vivo imaging.

In recent years, the safety problem of infant formula powder has provoked panic among Chinese citizens.One of the most notorious incidents was the 2008 Chinese milk scandal which harmed thousands of infants. Therefore the development of a fast, high throughput screening method towards melamine and other harmful chemicals is of paramount importance. Microsphere-based flow cytometry is a new multiplexing immunochemical method for food-testing. Through competition between the free analyte in the sample and analyte-coupled microspheres, the content of the analyte can be indirectly quantified by measuring the fluorescence emitted from labelled antibodies. This developed method of high sensitivity (limit of detection ¼ 0.70 ng ml À1 ) has already been validated and successfully applied to screen for melamine in various brands of infant formula powder analysis fulfilling the legislated tolerance level in a simple, fast, high throughput and organic solvent-free manner.

As mart gold nanoparticle based aptasensor is developed for the sensing of this biomarker in ac onvenient and fast manner. Acomprehensive study was performed to elucidate the driving force of DNA adsorption,d ifferent factors' effects, such as gold nanoparticle size, DNA length, concentration, and working pH towardss permine sensing by using UV/Vis absorption spectroscopya nd isothermalt itration calorimetry.I tw as found that the developed aptasensor could detectspermine by two differ-ent sensing mechanismss imply by adjustingt he DNA concentration without complicated procedures. Good performance in complicated matrices was provenb yt he satisfactory results obtained in the spike analysis of both artificial urine and clinical urine samples. Such af lexible and smart approach described here would provide au seful tool for the fast sensing of spermine and prostatec ancer screening.[a] T.

Those sensors increase the limits of detection (LOD) by using signal amplifiers but the hybridization times are usually long. [7] On the other hand, colorimetric sensor produce visible color changes upon the presence of the virus genes. The simplicity in design and readout of these sensors had attracted substantial attention. Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are one of the promising candidates for such detection strategy because of their high extinction coefficient and aggregation-dependent color change. [8,9] Despite the advantages, AuNPs are surface-sensitive and may induce undesired aggregations due to high ionic strength and concentration of ions, resulting in false-positive signals.Apart from those approaches, optical detection has drawn substantial attention because of their simplicity, sensitiveness, and multiplexity. [10,11] It is the fact that organic dyes are widely used in conventional qPCR assays via downconversion processes. [4,12,13] However, the dyes demonstrate undesirable emissive properties such as poor photostability, broad emission band, and small Stokes shift. [14] Therefore, they were usually employed as quenchers in nanoparticle-based detection systems. [15][16][17] High energy excited quantum dots (QDs) are another representative fluorophores in downconverting assays. [18][19][20] The excitation may induce background fluorescence and broad emission peaks, contributing to severe cross-talking problem. To address these limitations, nearinfrared (NIR) triggered upconversion luminescence (UCL) in lanthanide-doped upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) is very promising in biodetection. They not only display large anti-Stokes shift [21,22] but also pose minimal damage to the gene oligos. In addition, the long-lived UCL signal is easily distinguished from the short-lived background signal. As a result, UCNPs were used to detect different oligos and analytes. [23][24][25][26][27][28] The assays involved highly distance-dependent luminescence resonance energy transfer (LRET) between energy donor and acceptor, in which the luminescent intensity changes with the separation between the energy pair. [29] In this work, green emitting UCNPs and AuNPs are selected as the LRET pair owing to their well-matched emission and extinction spectrum, while AuNPs exhibit excellent extinction coefficient and photostability. The size of the nanoparticles played important roles in hybridization [30] because AuNPs demonstrate sizedependent absorption property and it can alter the stability of the hybridized DNA duplex. In addition, the size ratios of the UCNPs and AuNPs affect the formation of UCNPs-AuNPs hybrid structures. Taking advantages of 808 nm excitation of With large anti-Stokes shifts and background-free signals, upconversion luminescent (UCL) screening assays have been a promising method to reduce the transmission of influenza epidemic, which can critically alleviate the disease burden and extra annual deaths. In this work, a luminescent resonance energy transfer sandwich assay is developed, which utilizes core-shell...