In the race for a safe and effective vaccine against coronavirus disease (COVID)-19, pharmaceutical formulation science plays a critical role throughout the development, manufacturing, distribution, and vaccination phases. The proper choice of the type of vaccine, carrier or vector, adjuvant, excipients, dosage form, and route of administration can directly impact not only the immune responses induced and the resultant efficacy against COVID-19, but also the logistics of manufacturing, storing and distributing the vaccine, and mass vaccination. In this review, we described the COVID-19 vaccines that are currently tested in clinical trials and provided in-depth insight into the various types of vaccines, their compositions, advantages, and potential limitations. We also addressed how challenges in vaccine distribution and administration may be alleviated by applying vaccinestabilization strategies and the use of specific mucosal immune response-inducing, noninvasive routes of administration, which must be considered early in the development process.

A full dislocation often dissociates into two partial dislocations enclosing a stacking fault ͑SF͒ ribbon. The SF width significantly affects the mechanical behavior of metals. Al has very high stacking fault energy and, consequently, very narrow SF width in its coarse-grained state. We have found that some SFs in nanocrystalline Al are surprisingly 1.4 -6.8 nm wide, which is 1.5-11 times higher than the reported experimental value in single crystal Al. Our analytical model shows that such wide SFs are formed due to the small grain size and possibly also to the interaction of SF ribbons with high density of dislocations.

The lack of efficient tools to image non-repetitive genes in living cells has limited our ability to explore the functional impact of the spatiotemporal dynamics of such genes. Here, we addressed this issue by developing a CRISPR-Tag system using one to four highly active sgRNAs to specifically label protein-coding genes with a high signal-to-noise ratio for visualization by wide-field fluorescence microscopy. Our approach involves assembling a CRISPR-Tag within the intron region of a fluorescent protein and then integrating this cassette to N- or C-terminus of a specific gene, which enables simultaneous real-time imaging of protein and DNA of human protein-coding genes, such as HIST2H2BE, LMNA and HSPA8 in living cells. This CRISPR-Tag system, with a minimal size of ~250 bp DNA tag, represents an easily and broadly applicable technique to study the spatiotemporal organization of genomic elements in living cells.

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