human albumin (Kedbumin)

Comparison of SERS Substrates in Direct Analysis of Urine Samples for Detection of Albuminuria: Relatively Large Gold Nano-Spheroids Outperform Gold Nanorods on Gold Film.

Boranova Aigerim A, Kabyl Almat A, Tuleuov Bagdat B, Kassymaly Madiyar M et al.

Proteins found in human urine can be used as a source of information on kidney function and as possible biomarkers for diseases such as chronic kidney disease (CKD). Focusing on differentiating between high and low albumin concentrations in urine samples, this study examines the roles of various substrates in detecting albuminuria as a specific form of proteinuria using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). Using gold nanorods (AuNRs) and gold spheroidal nanoparticles (AuNPs) on various substrates to optimize the identification of albuminuria, we studied urine samples from 77 and 124 patients with albumin concentrations above and below 0.3 g/L. SERS spectra were analyzed using principal component analysis-linear discriminant analysis (PCA-LDA), partial least squares with linear discriminant analysis (PLS-LDA), and support vector machine (PLS-SVM)-to differentiate between high- and low-urinary-albumin groups. PLS-LDA was the best-performing method among the three methods. The largest of all tested nanoparticles, 200 nm diameter (D200 nm) AuNPs on gold substrates, performed best in distinguishing between high and low concentrations of albumin in urine, with a maximum average area under the curve (AUC) of 0.97, 100% sensitivity, 92% specificity, and 96% accuracy and a higher enhancement factor of 5.4 × 107 in comparison to the same parameters obtained with λ650 nm and λ750 nm AuNRs on gold, which demonstrated average AUC values of 0.86 and 0.77 and EFs of 11 and 3 × 106, respectively. These larger NPs create hot spots in nanogaps between nanoparticles, which may have better accessibility to protein molecules compared to hot spots created in gaps between smaller nanorods and nanoparticles. This study highlights the role of nanoparticle size and shape in determining optimal SERS substrate parameters, thereby yielding more accurate results in the detection of high concentrations of albumin in urine by direct SERS.

Interpretable Small-Sample Hyperspectral Phenotyping of Wheat Protein Fractions via Order-Optimized Derivative Preprocessing and TabPFN.

Li Zihao Z, Chen Zhaoyang Z, Wu Yuxing Y, Fang Meng M et al.

Rapid phenotyping of water- and salt-soluble wheat protein fractions can support grain quality evaluation and breeding. Whole-wheat flour from water-nitrogen and water-fertilizer trials was used to predict measured albumin and globulin contents and their derived sum, termed the metabolic-protein sum (albumin + globulin). After systematically comparing various preprocessing, wavelength selection, and regression approaches, a framework combining order-optimized derivative preprocessing (ODP), a hybrid feature-selection approach based on minimum redundancy maximum relevance (MRMR) and recursive feature elimination (RFE) and a tabular prior-data fitted network (TabPFN) regressor provided consistently strong test-set performance. The optimal derivative orders were 1.0 for albumin and the metabolic-protein sum and 0.8 for globulin. The ODP-MRMR-RFE-TabPFN framework retained 147, 46, and 70 wavelengths for albumin, globulin, and the metabolic-protein sum, yielding test set coefficient of determination (R2) values of 0.847, 0.693, and 0.850; root mean square error (RMSE) values of 3.073, 0.951, and 3.368 mg g-1; and residual prediction deviation (RPD) values of 2.554, 1.804, and 2.586, respectively. Leave-one-cultivar-out validation revealed substantial variation in predictive performance across held-out cultivars, with R2 and RPD ranging from 0.282 to 0.736 and from 1.180 to 1.945, respectively, for albumin, and from 0.416 to 0.750 and from 1.308 to 2.001, respectively, for globulin. Thus, although albumin achieved quantitative-level performance under the random train-test split, this performance was not consistently maintained for unseen cultivars, whereas globulin was generally more suitable for screening. SHapley additive explanations (SHAP) and partial dependence plots (PDPs) revealed that visible wavelengths contributed strongly to all models, with near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths supplying complementary information for globulin and the metabolic-protein sum. Overall, this framework offers rapid, interpretable flour-based estimation of metabolically active wheat protein fractions.

Focused Ultrasound as a Plasma Protein Binding-targeted Strategy to Enhance Brain Uptake of Donepezil.

Lee Songmin S, Kim Kyeonghwan K, Kim Hyungmin H, Oh Min-Seok MS et al.

Donepezil, a reversible acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, is widely used for the symptomatic treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Although higherdose donepezil has been shown to provide additional clinical benefit, dose escalation is often limited by cholinergic adverse effects. Given that approximately 96% of circulating donepezil is bound to plasma proteins, especially albumin, we hypothesized that increasing its unbound fraction from albumin may improve brain delivery without increasing the administered dose. To achieve this goal, herein we examined whether the donepezil-albumin complex can be dissociated by low-intensity focused ultrasound (FUS) in vitro. Then brain uptake of donepezil was evaluated in mice receiving intravenous donepezil followed by targeted brain FUS stimulation. As a result, FUS significantly increased unbound fraction of donepezil at the targeted region in vitro, resulting in a 41.1% increase of donepezil diffusion into dialysis cassettes compared with non-sonicated controls. In mice receiving intravenous donepezil, targeted brain FUS stimulation increased brain donepezil concentrations by 52.7% at 15-min post-administration time. These findings suggest that low-intensity FUS enhances brain uptake of donepezil, potentially through modulation of donepezil-albumin binding, and support further investigation of plasma protein binding-targeted brain drug delivery.

Rethinking albumin after paracentesis: It's not just about the volume.

Houston Kevin K, Arab Juan Pablo JP