Greg Madejski held his breath as he looked into the microscope, trying to weld two fingernail-sized chips together: a tiny chip containing a nanofilter on top of another chip with a DNA sensor.

It was frustrating work. The chips weren’t making good contact with each other. Madejski gently poked at the chips, then peered over the top of the microscope.

And exhaled.

The sudden waft of warm air swept over the nanofilter, transferring it to the sensor—right on target. The “accident” led Madejski to an important insight: the water vapor in his breath had condensed on the device, causing the nanofilter to adhere ever so neatly to the sensor.

And that’s how water vapor became integral to the development and design of a novel device for detecting DNA biomarkers affiliated with disease. Created by the lab of James McGrath, professor of biomedical engineering, in collaboration with Professor Vincent Tabard-Cossa and graduate student Kyle Briggs at the University of Ottawa, the device is described in an article published online at Nano Letters. The article, and an image from Madejski’s homemade animation of the device in operation, will be highlighted on the cover of the February 2018 print issue.

The device is comprised of three ultrathin layers:

• a nanoporous silicon nitride membrane that serves as a prefilter.
• a biosensor membrane with a single nanopore.
• a spacer layer that separates these by only 200 nm.

The arrangement creates a nanocavity filled with less than a femtoliter of fluid—or about a million times smaller than the smallest raindrops.

During operation, the device uses an electric field to lure a strand of DNA to enter one of the pores of the prefilter and then pass through the nanocavity to reach the pore of the underlying sensor membrane. This triggers changes in the device’s electrical current that can be detected and analyzed. The fact that DNA must elongate itself in a consistent way to pass through the two-membrane combination improves the precision and reproducibility of detection.

“This is a remarkable structure,” says McGrath. “We’ve built an integrated system with a highly porous filter within molecular reach of a sensor. I think there are many sensors, particularly those that hunt for biomarkers in raw biological fluids, that would benefit from filtering away unwanted molecules immediately upstream of the detector.”

The method of fabrication instantly wets the nanocavity, which is often difficult at the nanoscale. The device contains dozens of these nanocavities, which may eventually increase the amount of material that can be screened by enabling parallelized biomarker detection.

Read more here.

Medical Center researchers will delve into national Medicare data to understand whether a recent reform that bundles health care payments has deepened racial and socioeconomic disparities in joint replacement care. A new grant from the National Institutes of Health makes this research possible.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services introduced the Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement Model in April 2016 to improve coordination and quality of medical care for joint replacements. The model bundles all joint replacement care – from surgery to rehab – into a single payment, holding hospitals financially accountable for the quality and cost of care across that spectrum.

“The bundled payment model may motivate hospitals to adopt measures that could worsen racial and socioeconomic disparities of hip and knee replacement surgery utilization and outcomes,” says Caroline P. Thirukumaran, assistant professor of orthopaedics, public health sciences, and the Center for Musculoskeletal Research (CMSR). “Reducing the length of stay or discharging patients to home instead of a skilled nursing facility, for example, may reduce costs, but may not be sensitive to the unique needs of underrepresented patients.”

Thirukumaran, who will lead the study, also believes the bundled payment reform could hurt safety net hospitals, which care for a high proportion of racial minorities and low socioeconomic status patients who are in poorer health. These hospitals also have fewer resources to invest in quality improvement. Without specific measures to account for patient risk, these hospitals will likely perform poorly on the new model’s benchmarks, thereby worsening care for their vulnerable patients.

This is the first population health grant from the NIH ever awarded to the Department of Orthopaedics and CMSR, which has been among the top five NIH-funded orthopaedic research centers in the nation for over ten years.

Read more here.

The brain’s complex network of neurons enables us to interpret and effortlessly navigate and interact with the world around us.  But when these links are damaged due to injury or stroke, critical tasks like perception and movement can be disrupted. New research is helping scientists figure out how to harness the brain’s plasticity to rewire lost connections, an advance that could accelerate the development of neuro-prosthetics.

A new study in the journal Neuron, authored by Marc Schieber and Kevin Mazurek with the Department of Neurology and the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, shows that very low levels of electrical stimulation delivered directly to an area of the brain responsible for motor function can instruct an appropriate response or action. This essentially replaces the signals we would normally receive from the parts of the brain that process what we hear, see, and feel.

“The analogy is what happens when we approach a red light,” said Schieber.  “The light itself does not cause us to step on the brake, rather our brain has been trained to process this visual cue and send signals to another parts of the brain that control movement.  In this study, what we describe is akin to replacing the red light with an electrical stimulation which the brain has learned to associate with the need to take an action that stops the car.”

The findings could have significant implications for the development of brain-computer interfaces and neuro-prosthetics, which would allow a person to control a prosthetic device by tapping into the electrical activity of their brain.

Read more here.

Two University researchers who were recently awarded separate grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support their work in tackling some of the world’s most challenging health issues. Chunlei Guo, a professor in The Institute of Optics, is developing sanitation technology for areas of the world where clean water is scarce. Kirsi Jarvinen-Seppo, the Founders’ Distinguished Professor of Pediatric Allergy and an associate professor of pediatric allergy/immunology and allergy/immunology and rheumatology, is coordinating research to explore whether breastmilk can offer infants protection from key infectious diseases. The researchers were both awarded $1.5 million grants, making these the largest Gates Foundation awards granted in the University’s history. Read more here,

Wayne Knox, professor of optics, who has been elected a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. Knox has been awarded 50 US patents, and another 150 or so worldwide for his work in telecommunications, fiber optics, optical switching systems, and ultrafast lasers. Most recently, he co-invented a potentially game-changing way of correcting vision by noninvasively modifying the cornea with femtosecond lasers. It also works with contact lenses and intra-ocular lenses. Read more here.

Peter Wyman, professor of psychiatry, who will co-chair a Suicide Prevention Task Force recently announced by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. The state has the fifth highest number of suicides in the nation. The task force will examine and evaluate current suicide prevention programs, services and policies, and make recommendations to support populations in need. Wyman is highly regarded for his decades of research about how peer group influence can be leveraged to promote health, and has worked to implement state-funded suicide prevention programs at more than 60 schools across the state. Read more here.

Lihong Liu has joined the Department of Art and Art History as an assistant professor after appointments as postdoctoral fellow at the J. Paul Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and as the A.W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C. She was also a visiting assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University and a guest researcher at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz-Max-Plank-Institut in Italy. Liu specializes in Chinese art history and visual and material culture with a focus on the early modern era (1400–1800 CE). Her research pivots around the issues related to how artworks and ornaments can help delineate the interrelationship between human consciousness and the world in history and at present. In her book under preparation, Scenic Realities: On the Matter of Painting, China 1450– 1550, Liu explores an ecological approach to considering the practice of painting in the everyday environment in China’s mid-Ming dynasty. In a second book-length project she investigates the technical innovation of making colorless glass in Europe since the 15th century and its global transmission in the subsequent centuries. She interprets how new material changed people’s sense of the self in a transcultural context. She received her PhD from New York University.

Graduate and undergraduate students from the Goergen Institute for Data Science can improve your healthcare-related study with expertise in machine learning, predictive analytics, querying databases, interpreting data, or advanced data visualization.

Read more at the CTSI Stories Blog.

Andrew Vigoren, Physics, “Encoding and Decoding Depth from Images by Controlling Statistics and Spatial Coherence.” 2 p.m. December 15, 2017. Bausch and Lomb 106. Advisor: James Zavislan.

Andrea Cogliati, Electrical Engineering, “Toward a Human-Centric Automatic Piano Music Transcription System.” 1 p.m., December 15, 2017. Computer Studies Building 426. Advisor: Duan Zhiyao.

Joseph Izraelevitz, Computer Science, “Concurrency Implications of Nonvolatile Byte-Addressable Memory.” 1:30 p.m. December 20, 2017. Goergen 109. Advisor: Michael Scott.

Today: The Center for Integrated Research Computing (CIRC) symposium. Andrew McDavid from the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology. will discuss the statistical design of computational experiments. Zhuo Chen from the Department of Physics and Astronomy will describe some recent results from simulations of binary systems with giant stars.11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wegmans Hall 1400.

Today: Deadline to apply for a post-doctoral cancer research fellowship from Wilmot Cancer Institute. Go to the Wilmot Cancer Institute website for additional information and application. Contact Pam Iadarola at Pamela_Iadarola@URMC.Rochester.edu or 585-275-1537 with any questions.

Jan. 31: Deadline to enter the fifth annual America’s Got Regulatory Science Talent Student Competition,  in which students from across the University compete for a chance to present their regulatory science ideas at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Additional information, an entry form, and instructions on how to apply are on the America’s Got Regulatory Science Talent web page. Submit entry forms to Scott Steele by January 31, 2018.

Feb. 1: Deadline to submit initial abstracts for Public Health Science pilot projects to stimulate new collaborations with PHS faculty. Proposals are being solicited that support collaborative relationships between investigators who do not have a recent history (past 3 years) of joint funding or who want to expand their current collaborative efforts in new directions and for whom the pilot project would be catalytic in their effort to obtain extramural funding. More information can be found at the PHS website.

Feb. 8: “Deserts, Dust, and Iron Fertilization of the North Pacific Ocean: Cause or Consequence of Global Cooling?” Presented by Carmala Garzione, Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., Feldman Ballroom, Frederick Douglass Commons. Click here to register.

March 1: “Doing Better Next Time: Policy Lessons from the Great Recession and Not-So-Great Recovery.” Presented by Narayana Kocherlakota, Lionel W. McKenzie Professor of Economics. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., location TBD. Click here to register.

April 12: “The American Health Paradox: What’s Missing?” Presented by Nancy Bennett, professor of medicine and public health sciences, director of the Center for Community Health, and co-director of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., location TBD. Click here to register.