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We developed a novel method to control carryover contamination in loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) by primer engineering to carry recognition sites for a restriction endonuclease, providing a robust ability to eliminate carryover contaminants.

Many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs) bring great hardship to most of the existing classical evolutionary multi-objective optimization algorithms, respecting selection operators, computational cost, visualization of the high-dimensional Pareto front, and so on. Objective reduction can help mitigate such hardship by removing the redundant objectives in the original objective set to some extent. Objective reduction problem is inherently a multiobjective optimization problem because we aim to preserve the dominance structure by using as little objectives as possible. In this paper, we propose an objective reduction algorithm based on constrained evolutionary multiobjective algorithm. A novel local search is presented for finding the Pareto-front by searching the neighbor. We compared the proposed algorithm with three algorithms on eleven test instances. The experimental results show the proposed algorithm can obtain a stable performance without any parameter need to fine tune.

In this paper, the structural genome approach is used for multiscale analyses to predict the mechanical and thermal properties of particle reinforced hydrogel composites. First, the structure genome model of particle reinforced hydrogel composites is created by the random sequential adsorption algorithm. Then the mechanical properties and equivalent thermal conductivity of hydrogel composites are numerically studied by the structural genome approach. The effects of particles with different volume fractions and material properties on their mechanical and thermal properties are investigated. From the simulation results, it can be found that within a certain range of volume fraction, the mechanical properties and equivalent thermal conductivity of hydrogel composites are positively correlated with the volume fractions of particles. We also find that with the increase of the mechanical properties and thermal conductivity of particles, the properties of hydrogel can be improved and eventually reach stabilization. The structural genome approach shows excellent efficiency in multiscale structure analysis. It is a convenient method for the simulation of complex soft material composites.

Evolutionary Multi-objective optimization (EMO) Algorithms have been successfully applied in many practical problems. However, their performance deteriorated seriously for the problems with many objectives, i.e. many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs). In some practical applications, there exist some redundant objectives in an MaOP. Reducing the number of objectives of the optimization problem is one of the effective ways to solve the MaOPs with redundant objectives. It can improve the search efficiency of EMO algorithms, and reduce the computational cost. In this paper, we propose a new objective reduction algorithm. A criterion based on the number of non-dominated solution paired is presented to measure the conflict degree between objectives. Furthermore, we develop a effective objective reduction algorithm using feature selection technique. We compared the proposed algorithm with the LPCA, NLMVUP-CA and $\delta$-MOSS algorithm in some benchmark problems, and the results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

A one-step, rapid, and visual method was developed for the detection of RNA viruses and a few copies of the Zika RNA virus were directly detected within 25 min by naked-eye observation. This method will prove to be promising for point-of-care testing in out-of-lab and inconvenient settings.

A strand exchange amplification (SEA) method to detect foodborne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes was developed. SEA is a novel nucleic acid amplification method that only requires one pair of primers. The specie-specific primers were designed by targeting the 16S rRNA gene and the amplification reaction was performed as short as 60 min at 61 °C. Notably, SEA method could not only detect genomic DNA but also detect RNA by one step without requiring extra reverse transcription. The result could be visualized by naked eyes so that water bath pot would be the only equipment needed. Moreover, culture fluids and bacteria colony could be successfully detected without any pretreatment and the method displayed good specificity and strong anti-jamming capacity. These features greatly simplified the operating procedure and made SEA method be potential for developing point-of-care testing (POCT) devices to detect viable L. monocytogenes.