Associating brain imaging phenotypes and genetic risk factors via a hypergraph based netNMF method.

Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a severe neurodegenerative disease for which there is currently no effective treatment. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is an early disease that may progress to AD. The effective diagnosis of AD and MCI in the early stage has important clinical significance. Methods: To this end, this paper proposed a hypergraph-based netNMF (HG-netNMF) algorithm for integrating structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) of AD and MCI with corresponding gene expression profiles. Results: Hypergraph regularization assumes that regions of interest (ROIs) and genes were located on a non-linear low-dimensional manifold and can capture the inherent prevalence of two modalities of data and mined high-order correlation features of the two data. Further, this paper used the HG-netNMF algorithm to construct a brain structure connection network and a protein interaction network (PPI) with potential role relationships, mine the risk (ROI) and key genes of both, and conduct a series of bioinformatics analyses. Conclusion: Finally, this paper used the risk ROI and key genes of the AD and MCI groups to construct diagnostic models. The AUC of the AD group and MCI group were 0.8 and 0.797, respectively.

A novel AIEgen-based probe for detecting cysteine in lipid droplets.

A smart fluorescent probe DPAS-Cys has been rationally designed based on a typical AIEgen DPAS and an acrylate moiety. The probe DPAS-Cys not only can be used for the detection of cysteine (Cys) selectively with large Stokes shift (200 nm) and relatively low detection limit (2.4 µM), but also shows lipid droplets (LDs) targeting property. The response mechanism for Cys was carefully verified. Importantly, due to the aggregation-induced emission characteristic, the introduction of considerable percentage of traditional organic solvent is avoidable, which makes it suitable for bioimaging in physiological systems. In addition, the confocal fluorescence imaging demonstrates that DPAS-Cys is able to detect Cys in LDs of different cell lines with universality. Our study opens a new avenue to understand the importance of LDs in biosystem, for which the gap between the essential biothiol Cys and the energy storage organelle LDs was bridged for the first time.