Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed a novel cell segmentation technology for accurate analysis of non-spherical cells and that offers a comprehensive, high-throughput approach for analyzing the transcriptomic and metabolomic data to study complex biological processes at the single-cell level.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed a technology that offers a sophisticated solution for collecting and measuring gas emissions from surfaces, particularly skin, with high sensitivity and specificity.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed a device for non-invasive, simultaneous monitoring of fetal and maternal heart rates to enhance reproductive management and health monitoring.

This technology represents a breakthrough in non-invasive hemodynamic monitoring by utilizing coherent light to assess physiological parameters with high accuracy

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have developed a device to monitor the heart using radiofrequency signals to improve the detection and diagnosis of various cardiovascular conditions. The device can integrate with existing mobile products, which is particularly helpful for older adults and those with limited access to adequate medical facilities.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed a system that significantly improves the accuracy and efficiency of stress detection through electrodermal activity monitoring.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed a semiautomated solution for identifying differences in tissue architectures or cell types as well as visualizing and analyzing cell densities and cell-cell associations in a tissue sample.

         While nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is one of the most universal synthetic chemistry tools for its ability to measure highly specific kinetic and structural information nondestructively/noninvasively, it is costly and low-throughput primarily due to the small sample-size volumes and expensive equipment needed for stringent magnetic field homogeneity. Conversely, zero-to-ultralow field (ZULF) NMR is an emerging alternative offering similar chemical information but relaxing field homogeneity requirements during detection. ZULF NMR has been further propelled by recent advancements in key componentry, optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs), but suffers in scope due to its low sensitivity and its susceptibility to noise. It has not been possible to detect most organic molecules without resorting to hyperpolarization or 13C enrichment using ZULF NMR.         To overcome these challenges, UC Berkeley researchers have developed a multi-channel ZULF spectrometer that greatly improves on both the sensitivity and throughput abilities of state-of-the art ZULF NMR devices. The novel spectrometer was used in the first reported detection of organic molecules in natural isotopic abundance by ZULF NMR, with sensitivity comparable to current commercial benchtop NMR spectrometers. A proof-of-concept multichannel version of the ZULF spectrometer was capable of measuring three distinct chemical samples simultaneously. The combined sensitivity and throughput distinguish the present ZULF NMR spectrometer as a novel chemical analysis tool at unprecedented scales, potentially enabling emerging fields such as robotic chemistry, as well as meeting the demands of existing fields such as chemical manufacturing, agriculture, and pharmaceutical industries.

         Recent advancements in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy have underscored the need for novel instrumentation, but current commercial instrumentation performs well primarily for pre-existing, mainstream applications. Modalities involving, in particular, integrated electron-nuclear spin control, dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP), and non-traditional NMR pulse sequences would benefit greatly from more flexible and capable hardware and software. Advances in these areas would allow many innovative NMR methodologies to reach the market in the coming years.          To address this opportunity, UC Berkeley researchers have developed a novel high-speed, high-memory NMR spectrometer and hyperpolarizer. The device is compact, rack-mountable and cost-effective compared to existing spectrometers. Furthermore, the spectrometer features robust, high-speed NMR transmit and receive functions, synthesizing and receiving signals at the Larmor frequency and up to 2.7GHz. The spectrometer features on-board, phase-sensitive detection and windowed acquisition that can be carried out over extended periods and across millions of pulses. These and additional features are tailored for integrated electron-nuclear spin control and DNP. The invented spectrometer/hyperpolarizer opens up new avenues for NMR pulse control and DNP, including closed-loop feedback control, electron decoupling, 3D spin tracking, and potential applications in quantum sensing.

Rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) is a method for quickly determining the most effective antibiotic therapy for patients with bacterial infections. These techniques enable the detection and quantification of antibiotic-resistant and susceptible bacteria metabolites at concentrations near or below ng/mL in complex media. Employing bacterial metabolites as a sensing platform, the system integrates machine learning data analysis processes to differentiate between antibiotic susceptibility and resistance in clinical infections within an hour. With the results, a clinician can prescribe appropriate medicine for the patient's bacterial infection.

This technology revolves around Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), a noninvasive imaging method that provides detailed cross-sectional images of tissue microstructure and blood flow. OCT utilizes either time domain (TDOCT) or Fourier domain (FDOCT) approaches, with FDOCT offering superior sensitivity and speed. Doppler OCT combines Doppler principles with OCT to visualize tissue structure and blood flow concurrently. Additionally, polarization-sensitive OCT detects tissue birefringence. Advanced methods aim to enhance the speed and sensitivity of Doppler OCT, crucial for various clinical applications such as ocular diseases and cancer diagnosis. Swept source FDOCT systems further improve imaging capabilities by increasing range and sensitivity. Overall, this technology represents significant advancements in biomedical imaging, offering insights into both structural and functional aspects of tissue physiology.

The invention presents a microfluidic platform equipped with specialized trapping arrays and droplet generation capabilities, enabling precise control over the formation of microvortices within cell-laden droplets. This novel system facilitates the study of cell-cell interactions at a single-cell level, offering configurable microenvironments for analyzing cell dynamics and pair relationships.

An innovative mass spectrometry platform that utilizes sulfoxide-containing MS-cleavable heterobifunctional photoactivated cross-linkers to enhance protein structural elucidation.

This patent application describes methods for non-invasive, label-free imaging of the cellular immune response in human skin using a nonlinear optical imaging system.

A novel method and device for high-throughput sorting of cells in suspension, particularly focusing on the separation of key cellular blood components of the immune system. The patent application presents a novel approach to high-throughput cell sorting, particularly suitable for applications in medicine and biotechnology where precise separation of cell populations is crucial.

The disclosed methods offer a robust approach to accurately quantify skin optical properties across different skin tones, facilitating improved diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment in dermatology.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed a method of using artificial intelligence for assessing the effectiveness or efficacy of drugs that is cheaper, faster, and more accurate than commonly used assay analyses.

Dysfluent speech modeling requires time-accurate and silence-aware transcription at both the word-level and phonetic-level. However, current research in dysfluency modeling primarily focuses on either transcription or detection, and the performance of each aspect remains limited.To address this problem, UC Berkeley researchers have developed a new unconstrained dysfluency modeling (UDM) approach that addresses both transcription and detection in an automatic and hierarchical manner. Furthermore, a simulated dysfluent dataset called VCTK++ enhances the capabilities of UDM in phonetic transcription. The effectiveness and robustness of UDM in both transcription and detection tasks has been demonstrated experimentally.UDM eliminates the need for extensive manual annotation by providing a comprehensive solution.

Lipoxygenases (LOX) are enzymes that catalyze the peroxidation of certain fatty acids. The cell membrane is mostly made of lipids (which include fatty acids), and peroxidation can cause damage to the cell membrane. The human genome contains six functional LOX genes that encode for six LOX enzyme variants, or isozymes. The role that each LOX isozyme plays in health and disease varies greatly, spanning issues such as asthma, diabetes, and stroke. LOX enzymes are extremely difficult to target due to high hydrophobicity. Potential leads are often ineffective because they are either not readily soluble or not selective for a particular LOX enzyme.  Studies have implicated human epithelial 15-lipoxygenase-2 (h15-LOX-2, ALOX15B) in various diseases. h15-LOX-2 is highly expressed in atherosclerotic plaques and is linked to the progression of macrophages to foam cells, which are present in atherosclerotic plaques. h15-LOX-2 mRNA levels are also highly elevated in human macrophages isolated from carotid atherosclerotic lesions in symptomatic patients. Children with cystic fibrosis had reduced levels of h15-LOX-2, which affects the lipoxin A4 to leukotriene B4 ratio. Furthermore, the interactions of h15-LOX-2 and PEBP1 changes the substrate specificity of h15-LOX-2 from free polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) to PUFA-phosphatidylethanolamines (PE), leading to the generation of hydroperoxyeicosatetraenoic acid (HpETE) esterified into PE (HpETE-PE). Accumulation of these hydroperoxyl membrane phospholipids has been shown to cause ferroptotic cell death, which implicates h15-LOX-2 in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s diseases.  

Engineers from UC San Diego have disclosed a new patent-pending technology (SHARP, VERTICALLY ALIGNED NANOWIRE ELECTRODE ARRAYS, HIGH-YIELD FABRICATION ANDINTRACELLULAR RECORDING) that minimizes the electrode size to an intracellular probe, and is scalable to integrate multiple channels at one platform and overcomes the previous disadvantages such as invasiveness and insensitivity. This newly disclosed improved technology reduces the number of steps and the number of metal layers used to increase the biocompatibility and device yield, as compared to an earlier disclosure for NEAs that were fabricated using a different process.

Electrical properties (EP), such as permittivity and conductivity, dictate the interactions between electromagnetic waves and biological tissue. EP are biomarkers for pathology characterization, such as cancer. Imaging of EP helps monitor the health of the tissue and can provide important information in therapeutic procedures. Magnetic resonance (MR)-based electrical properties tomography (MR-EPT) uses MR measurements, such as the magnetic transmit field B1+, to reconstruct EP. These reconstructions rely on the calculations of spatial derivatives of the measured B1+. However, the numerical approximation of derivatives leads to noise amplifications introducing errors and artifacts in the reconstructions. Recently, a supervised learning-based method (DL-EPT) has been introduced to reconstruct robust EP maps from noisy measurements. Still, the pattern-matching nature of this method does not allow it to generalize for new samples since the network’s training is done on a limited number of simulated data pairs, which makes it unrealistic in clinical applications. Thus, there is a need for a robust and realistic method for EP map construction.

One of the key limitations for devices used in point-of-care diagnostics (POCD) is their limit of detection; patient samples used for POCD devices often contain too low of the target analyte. FlexThrough is a newly developed, centrifugal disk (CD)-based method that utilizes the entirety of a liquid sample via recirculation of the sample for efficient mixing as it iteratively passes through the system.

Researchers at UC Irvine have developed an optical detection system for SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens that features improvements in screening time, cost, sensitivity, and practicality. As vaccine availability, economic pressure, and mental health considerations has gradually returned society to pre-pandemic activities that require frequent and close interactions, it is imperative that SARS-CoV-2 detection systems remain effective.

 As currently available antibiotics become ineffective due to the rise in antibiotic resistance among pathogenic bacteria, development of completely new classes of antibiotics is critical. Classic antibiotics target pathogens and commensal bacteria indiscriminately; therefore, their use puts selective pressure on both populations. Because of the abundance of commensals within a mammalian host, antibiotic resistance is thought to arise more frequently in commensal bacteria and is horizontally transferred to pathogens. In contrast to classic antibiotics, virulence blockers are compounds that selectively inhibit the expression or function of a virulence factor in a pathogen or group of pathogens. Advantages of virulence blockers are twofold. For one, selective pressure on a limited number of microbes, i.e., only pathogens expressing the molecular target of the virulence blocker, should limit the evolution of resistance. Second, the decreased commensal killing by virulence blockers has the potential to preserve a healthy microbiota, which is critical for maintaining gut homeostasis and defending against opportunistic pathogens. Type III secretion systems (T3SS) are bacterial appendages required by dozens of pathogens to cause disease, including Salmonella, enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC), Shigella, Pseudomonas, and Yersinia, but they are largely absent in nonpathogenic bacteria. Bacteria use T3SS to inject bacterial effector proteins into target host cells to manipulate host processes for the benefit of the pathogen. Seven T3SS injectisome families have been identified and share a number of homologous membrane-associated components with the flagellar basal body. Agents that target T3SS would be key virulance blockers for a set of pathogens that are very important to human and animal health as are methods of screening for such agents. 

Researchers at UC Irvine have characterized an electrophysiological-based drug discovery approach that offers a new modality with which to screen potential therapeutics and characterize mutations. This new level of analysis utilizes elements that are shared between rodents and humans, improving upon the uncertainties associated with rodent behavior. It also incorporates the full complexity of operations in a single assay, while rapidly specifying site(s) of action, thereby accelerating R&D for psychiatric illnesses.