Cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) has the advantage of rapid expression of proteins and has been widely implemented in synthetic biology and protein engineering. However, the critical problem limiting CFPS industrial application is its relatively high cost, which partly attributes to the overexpense of single-use DNA templates. Hydrogels provide a possible solution because they can preserve and reutilize the DNA templates in CFPS and have great potential in elevating the protein production yield of the CFPS. Here, we presented a low-cost hybrid hydrogel simply prepared with polyethylene glycol diacrylate (PEGDA) and DNA, which is capable of high-efficient and repeated protein synthesis in CFPS. Parameters governing protein production specific to hybrid hydrogels were optimized. Structures and physical properties of the hybrid hydrogel were characterized. Transcription and expression kinetics of solution phase system and gel phased systems were investigated. The results showed that PEGDA/DNA hydrogel can enhance the protein expression of the CFPS system and enable a repeated protein production for tens of times. This PEGDA/DNA hybrid hydrogel can serve as a recyclable gene carrier for either batch or continuous protein expression, and paves a path toward more powerful, scalable protein production and cell-free synthetic biology.
People counting is one of the hottest issues in sensing applications. The impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) radar has been extensively applied to count people, providing a device-free solution without illumination and privacy concerns. However, performance of current solutions is limited in congested environments due to the superposition and obstruction of signals. In this letter, a hybrid feature extraction method based on curvelet transform and distance bin is proposed. 2-D radar matrix features are extracted in multiple scales and multiple angles by applying the curvelet transform. Furthermore, the distance bin is introduced by dividing each row of the matrix into several bins along the propagating distance to select features. The radar signal dataset in three dense scenarios is constructed, including people randomly walking in the constrained area with densities of 3 and 4 persons per square meter, and queueing with an average distance of 10 centimeters. The number of people is up to 20 in the dataset. Four classifiers including decision tree, AdaBoost, random forest and neural network are compared to validate the hybrid features, and random forest performs the highest accuracies of all above 97% in three dense scenarios. Moreover, to ensure the reliability of the hybrid features, three other features including cluster features, activity features and CNN features are compared. The experimental results reveal that the proposed hybrid feature extraction method exhibits stable performance with significantly superior effectiveness.
The monitoring of human activity and vital signs plays a significant role in remote health-care. Radar provides a non-contact monitoring approach without privacy and illumination concerns. However, multiple people in a narrow indoor environment bring dense multipaths for activity monitoring, and the received vital sign signals are heavily distorted with body movements. This paper proposes a framework based on Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) and Impulse Radio Ultra-Wideband (IR-UWB) radars to address these challenges, designing intelligent spatial-temporal information fusion for activity and vital sign monitoring. First, a local binary pattern (LBP) and energy features are extracted from FMCW radar, combined with the wavelet packet transform (WPT) features on IR-UWB radar for activity monitoring. Then the additional information guided fusing network (A-FuseNet) is proposed with a modified generative and adversarial structure for vital sign monitoring. A Cascaded Convolutional Neural Network (CCNN) module and a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) module are designed as the fusion sub-network for vital sign information extraction and multisensory data fusion, while a discrimination sub-network is constructed to optimize the fused heartbeat signal. In addition, the activity and movement characteristics are introduced as additional information to guide the fusion and optimization. A multi-radar dataset with an FMCW and two IR-UWB radars in a cotton tent, a small room and a wide lobby is constructed, and the accuracies of activity and vital sign monitoring achieve 99.9% and 92.3% respectively. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority and robustness of the proposed framework.
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