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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Future heat stress to reduce people’s purchasing power
    (San Francisco, Ca. : PLOS, 2021) Kuhla, Kilian; Willner, Sven Norman; Otto, Christian; Wenz, Leonie; Levermann, Anders
    With increasing carbon emissions rising temperatures are likely to impact our economies and societies profoundly. In particular, it has been shown that heat stress can strongly reduce labor productivity. The resulting economic perturbations can propagate along the global supply network. Here we show, using numerical simulations, that output losses due to heat stress alone are expected to increase by about 24% within the next 20 years, if no additional adaptation measures are taken. The subsequent market response with rising prices and supply shortages strongly reduces the consumers’ purchasing power in almost all countries including the US and Europe with particularly strong effects in India, Brazil, and Indonesia. As a consequence, the producing sectors in many regions temporarily benefit from higher selling prices while decreasing their production in quantity, whereas other countries suffer losses within their entire national economy. Our results stress that, even though climate shocks may stimulate economic activity in some regions and some sectors, their unpredictability exerts increasing pressure on people’s livelihood.
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    Three step flow focusing enables image-based discrimination and sorting of late stage 1 Haematococcus pluvialis cells
    (San Francisco, Ca. : PLOS, 2021) Kraus, Daniel; Kleiber, Andreas; Ehrhardt, Enrico; Leifheit, Matthias; Horbert, Peter; Urban, Matthias; Gleichmann, Nils; Mayer, Guenter; Popp, Juergen; Henkel, Thomas
    Label-free and gentle separation of cell stages with desired target properties from mixed stage populations are a major research task in modern biotechnological cultivation process and optimization of micro algae. The reported microfluidic sorter system (MSS) allows the subsequent investigation of separated subpopulations. The implementation of a viability preserving MSS is shown for separation of late stage 1 Haematococcus pluvialis (HP) cells form a mixed stage population. The MSS combines a three-step flow focusing unit for aligning the cells in single file transportation mode at the center of the microfluidic channel with a pure hydrodynamic sorter structure for cell sorting. Lateral displacement of the cells into one of the two outlet channels is generated by piezo-actuated pump chambers. In-line decision making for sorting is based on a user-definable set of image features and properties. The reported MSS significantly increased the purity of target cells in the sorted population (94%) in comparison to the initial mixed stage population (19%).
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    Correcting systematic errors by hybrid 2D correlation loss functions in nonlinear inverse modelling
    (San Francisco, California, US : PLOS, 2023) Mayerhöfer, Thomas G.; Noda, Isao; Pahlow, Susanne; Heintzmann, Rainer; Popp, Jürgen
    Recently a new family of loss functions called smart error sums has been suggested. These loss functions account for correlations within experimental data and force modeled data to obey these correlations. As a result, multiplicative systematic errors of experimental data can be revealed and corrected. The smart error sums are based on 2D correlation analysis which is a comparably recent methodology for analyzing spectroscopic data that has found broad application. In this contribution we mathematically generalize and break down this methodology and the smart error sums to uncover the mathematic roots and simplify it to craft a general tool beyond spectroscopic modelling. This reduction also allows a simplified discussion about limits and prospects of this new method including one of its potential future uses as a sophisticated loss function in deep learning. To support its deployment, the work includes computer code to allow reproduction of the basic results.
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    One-shot phase-recovery using a cellphone RGB camera on a Jamin-Lebedeff microscope
    (San Francisco, California, US : PLOS, 2019) Diederich, Benedict; Marsikova, Barbora; Amos, Brad; Heintzmann, Rainer
    Jamin-Lebedeff (JL) polarization interference microscopy is a classical method for determining the change in the optical path of transparent tissues. Whilst a differential interference contrast (DIC) microscopy interferes an image with itself shifted by half a point spread function, the shear between the object and reference image in a JL-microscope is about half the field of view. The optical path difference (OPD) between the sample and reference region (assumed to be empty) is encoded into a color by white-light interference. From a color-table, the Michel-Levy chart, the OPD can be deduced. In cytology JL-imaging can be used as a way to determine the OPD which closely corresponds to the dry mass per area of cells in a single image. Like in other interference microscopy methods (e.g. holography), we present a phase retrieval method relying on single-shot measurements only, thus allowing real-time quantitative phase measurements. This is achieved by adding several customized 3D-printed parts (e.g. rotational polarization-filter holders) and a modern cellphone with an RGB-camera to the Jamin-Lebedeff setup, thus bringing an old microscope back to life. The algorithm is calibrated using a reference image of a known phase object (e.g. optical fiber). A gradient-descent based inverse problem generates an inverse look-up-table (LUT) which is used to convert the measured RGB signal of a phase-sample into an OPD. To account for possible ambiguities in the phase-map or phase-unwrapping artifacts we introduce a total-variation based regularization. We present results from fixed and living biological samples as well as reference samples for comparison.