BACKGROUND Approximately one third of needle biopsies that are performed to rule out malignancy of indeterminate pulmonary nodules detected radiologically during lung cancer screening are negative, thus exposing cancer-free patients to risks of pneumothorax, bleeding, and infection. A noninvasive confirmatory tool (eg, liquid biopsy) is urgently needed in the lung cancer diagnosis setting to stratify patients who should receive biopsy versus those who should be monitored. METHODS A novel antigen-independent, 4-color fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH)-based method was developed to detect circulating tumor cells (CTCs) with abnormalities in gene copy numbers in mononuclear cell-enriched peripheral blood samples from patients with (n = 107) and without (n = 100) lung cancer. RESULTS Identification of CTCs using FISH probes at 10q22.3/CEP10 and 3p22.1/3q29 detected lung cancer cases with 94.2% accuracy, 89% sensitivity, and 100% specificity compared with biopsy. CONCLUSION The high accuracy of this liquid biopsy method suggests that it may be used as a noninvasive decision tool to reduce the frequency of unnecessary needle biopsy in patients with benign pulmonary lesions. © 2020 American Cancer Society.The constant emergence of New Psychoactive Substances is a challenge to clinical and forensic toxicologists that need to constantly update analytical techniques to detecting them. A large portion of these substances are synthetic cannabinoids. The aim of this study was to develop a rapid and simple method for the determination of synthetic cannabinoids and their metabolites in urine and blood using GC-MS. The method involves an Ultrasound-Assisted Dispersive Liquid-Liquid Microextraction which implies a rapid procedure, giving excellent extraction efficiencies with minimal use of toxic solvents. This is followed by silylation and analysis with GC-MS. The chromatographic method allows for the separation and identification of 29 selected synthetic cannabinoids and some metabolites. The method was validated on urine and blood samples with the ability to detect and quantify all analytes with satisfactory limits of detection (from 1 to 5 ng/mL), limits of quantification (5 ng/mL), selectivity and linearity (in the range 5 – 200 ng/mL). The developed assay is highly applicable to laboratories with limited instrumental availability, thanks to the use of efficient and low-cost sample preparation and instrumental equipment. The latter may contribute to enhance the detection of NPS in clinical and forensic toxicology laboratories. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.In Huntington’s disease, the length of the polyglutamine tract in the mutant protein correlates positively with the formation of aggregates and disease symptoms and severity of the disease. Some disease-modifying factors exist. However, no organized study has been carried out to investigate the effect of polyglutamine length in the mutant protein on the efficacy of a therapeutic strategy. We had shown earlier that the helical peptide arising out of the N-terminal stretch of normal huntingtin is able to inhibit aggregation of a number of proteins, including luciferase, α-synuclein, p53, and Rnq1. In this work, we show that polyglutamine stretches of differing lengths, namely 51Q, 72Q, and 103Q, form a mixture of aggregates at different rates, with the rate increasing in a polyQ length-dependent manner. The helical peptide is able to inhibit the rate of aggregation. The extent of inhibition was different when measuring either total aggregation or only fibrillar aggregates, suggesting that the helical peptide with benign polyQ stretch alters the aggregation landscape of different elongated polyQ lengths differently. Our results suggest that designing a therapeutic approach to inhibit protein aggregation must take note of polyQ length of the protein. © 2020 International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.High-throughput sequencing (HTS) is central to the study of population genomics and has an increasingly important role in constructing phylogenies. Choices in research design for sequencing projects can include a wide range of factors, such as sequencing platform, depth of coverage, and bioinformatic tools. Simulating HTS data better informs these decisions, as you can validate software by comparing output to the known simulation parameters. However, current standalone HTS simulators cannot generate variant haplotypes under even somewhat complex evolutionary scenarios, such as recombination or demographic change. This greatly reduces their usefulness for fields such as population genomics and phylogenomics. Here I present the R package jackalope that simply and efficiently simulates (a) sets of variant haplotypes from a reference genome and (b) reads from both Illumina and Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) platforms. click here Haplotypes can be simulated using phylogenies, gene trees, coalescent-simulation output, population-genomic summary statistics, and Variant Call Format (VCF) files. jackalope can simulate single, paired-end, or mate-pair Illumina reads, as well as reads from Pacific Biosciences. These simulations include sequencing errors, mapping qualities, multiplexing, and optical/PCR duplicates. It can read reference genomes from FASTA files and can simulate new ones, and all outputs can be written to standard file formats. jackalope is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.In this study, the new and efficient three-dimensional network porous aromatic frameworks materials called as Silica-PAFs-a, Florisil-PAFs-a, Silica-PAFs-b and Florisil-PAFs-b were first synthesized. The properties of materials were analyzed by five characterization methods. And they were used as adsorbents in pipette-tip solid-phase extraction for the effective determination of carbendazim and thiabendazole in spinach sample. Meanwhile, the obtained materials were tested by static adsorption and dynamic adsorption. The result showed that the specific surface area of materials greatly increased after introducing three-dimensional network porous aromatic frameworks. And microstructure modification exposed a large number of amino reactive groups which made them have a better adsorption amount for the two targets. The calibration graphs of carbendazim and thiabendazole in methanol were linear over 0.10-300.0 μg/mL, and the limits of detection and quantification were 0.00546 and 0.0182 μg/mL, 0.00741 and 0.0247μg/mL respectively.