ATDBio (United Kingdom)

Single-cell transcriptomics, which utilises barcodes and unique molecular identifiers (UMIs) for polyA+ mRNA capture, is compromised by oligonucleotide synthesis errors. To address this, we modified the oligonucleotide capture design and integrated an interposed anchor between the barcode and the UMI. This design significantly reduces the need to discard reads due to synthesis inaccuracies. Our results demonstrate that this anchor-enhanced design substantially improves gene expression profiles in droplet-based single-cell sequencing analyses.

As face recognition algorithms become more accurate and get deployed more widely, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that the algorithms work equally well for everyone. We study the geographic performance differentials—differences in false acceptance and false rejection rates across different countries—when comparing selfies against photos from ID documents. We show how to mitigate geographic performance differentials using sampling strategies despite large imbalances in the dataset. Using vanilla domain adaptation strategies to fine-tune a face recognition CNN on domain-specific doc-selfie data improves the performance of the model on such data, but, in the presence of imbalanced training data, also significantly increases the demographic bias. We then show how to mitigate this effect by employing sampling strategies to balance the training procedure.

Aminoalkyl and alkyne-tagged PNA HyBeacons have been synthesized, labeled with fluorescein via conventional amide bond or triazole formation (click chemistry) and used to detect single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) implicated in statin-induced myopathy. The PNA HyBeacons gave much better mismatch/mutant discrimination than conventional DNA HyBeacons but smaller fluorescence changes on melting.

3-Aminophenyl-modified analogues of the bicyclic nucleoside N-methyl-3H-pyrrolo[2,3-d]pyrimidin-2(7H)-one were synthesised and incorporated directly into triplex-forming oligonucleotides in order to utilise their extended hydrogen bonding motif for recognition of the CG base pair. All analogues demonstrated strong binding affinity and very good selectivity for CG from pH 6.2 to 7.0; a marked improvement on previous modifications.