Influence of Endogenous Factors of Food Matrices on Avidin–Biotin Immunoassays for the Detection of Bacitracin and Colistin in Food

(Strept)avidin–biotin technology is frequently used in immunoassay systems to improve their analytical properties. It is known from clinical practice that many (strept)avidin–biotin-based tests provide false results when analyzing patient samples with a high content of endogenous biotin. No specific investigation has been carried out regarding possible interferences from avidin (AVI) and biotin (B7) contained in food matrices in (strept)avidin–biotin-based immunoanalytical systems for food safety. Two kinds of competitive ELISAs for bacitracin (BT) and colistin (COL) determination in food matrices were developed based on conventional hapten–protein coating conjugates and biotinylated BT and COL bound to immobilized streptavidin (SAV). Coating SAV–B7–BT and SAV–B7–COL complexes-based ELISAs provided 2- and 15-times better sensitivity in BT and COL determination, corresponding to 0.6 and 0.3 ng/mL, respectively. Simultaneously with the determination of the main analytes, these kinds of tests were used as competitive assays for the assessment of AVI or B7 content up to 10 and 1 ng/mL, respectively, in food matrices (egg, infant milk formulas enriched with B7, chicken and beef liver). Matrix-free experiments with AVI/B7-enriched solutions showed distortion of the standard curves, indicating that these ingredients interfere with the adequate quantification of analytes. Summarizing the experience of the present study, it is recommended to avoid immunoassays based on avidin–biotin interactions when analyzing biosamples containing these endogenous factors or enriched with B7.

Rigid Sets and Coherent Sets in Realistic Ocean Flows

This paper focuses on the extractions of Lagrangian Coherent Sets from realistic velocity fields obtained from ocean data and simulations, each of which can be highly resolved and non volume-preserving. We introduce two novel methods for computing two formulations of such sets. First, we propose a new “diffeomorphism-based” criterion to extract “rigid sets”, defined as sets over which the flow map acts approximately as a rigid transformation. Second, we develop a matrix-free methodology that provides a simple and efficient framework to compute “coherent sets” with operator methods. Both new methods and their resulting rigid sets and coherent sets are illustrated and compared using three numerically simulated flow examples, including a high-resolution realistic, submesoscale to large-scale dynamic ocean current field in the Palau Island region of the western Pacific Ocean.

hyper.deal: An Efficient, Matrix-free Finite-element Library for High-dimensional Partial Differential Equations

This work presents the efficient, matrix-free finite-element library hyper.deal for solving partial differential equations in two up to six dimensions with high-order discontinuous Galerkin methods. It builds upon the low-dimensional finite-element library deal.II to create complex low-dimensional meshes and to operate on them individually. These meshes are combined via a tensor product on the fly, and the library provides new special-purpose highly optimized matrix-free functions exploiting domain decomposition as well as shared memory via MPI-3.0 features. Both node-level performance analyses and strong/weak-scaling studies on up to 147,456 CPU cores confirm the efficiency of the implementation. Results obtained with the library hyper.deal are reported for high-dimensional advection problems and for the solution of the Vlasov–Poisson equation in up to six-dimensional phase space.

p-Multilevel Preconditioners for HHO Discretizations of the Stokes Equations with Static Condensation

We propose a p-multilevel preconditioner for hybrid high-order (HHO) discretizations of the Stokes equation, numerically assess its performance on two variants of the method, and compare with a classical discontinuous Galerkin scheme. An efficient implementation is proposed where coarse level operators are inherited using $$L^2$$ L 2 -orthogonal projections defined over mesh faces and the restriction of the fine grid operators is performed recursively and matrix-free. Both h- and k-dependency are investigated tackling two- and three-dimensional problems on standard meshes and graded meshes. For the two HHO formulations, featuring discontinuous or hybrid pressure, we study how the combination of p-coarsening and static condensation influences the V-cycle iteration. In particular, two different static condensation procedures are considered for the discontinuous pressure HHO variant, resulting in global linear systems with a different number of unknowns and matrix non-zero entries. Interestingly, we show that the efficiency of the solution strategy might be impacted by static condensation options in the case of graded meshes.