Megaselia scalaris (Diptera: Phoridae), commonly known as scuttle fly, is widely distributed all over the world. It is easily cultured in the laboratory condition making it a potential model organism. Besides, it has forensic importance. However, no report from Bangladesh could be retrieved about this fly. So, in the present study, identification of this species was attempted using both morphological and molecular approaches. Characteristics of male hypopygium and legs played key roles in morphological identification. To strengthen identification, mitochondrial COI and 16S rRNA gene fragments were amplified and sequenced. Blast search at NCBI provided highest hits to available COI and 16S rRNA sequences of M. scalaris. A neighbor joining phylogenetic tree was built using sequences of respective COI gene region to show its relationship among other closely related dipteran flies. Dhaka Univ. J. Biol. Sci. 25(2): 149-159, 2016 (July)

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Background With the global spread of COVID-19, the world has seen many patients, including many severe cases. The rapid development of machine learning (ML) has made significant disease diagnosis and prediction achievements. Current studies have confirmed that omics data at the host level can reflect the development process and prognosis of the disease. Since early diagnosis and effective treatment of severe COVID-19 patients remains challenging, this research aims to use omics data in different ML models for COVID-19 diagnosis and prognosis. We used several ML models on omics data of a large number of individuals to first predict whether patients are COVID-19 positive or negative, followed by the severity of the disease. Results On the COVID-19 diagnosis task, we got the best AUC of 0.99 with our multilayer perceptron model and the highest F1-score of 0.95 with our logistic regression (LR) model. For the severity prediction task, we achieved the highest accuracy of 0.76 with an LR model. Beyond classification and predictive modeling, our study founds ML models performed better on integrated multi-omics data, rather than single omics. By comparing top features from different omics dataset, we also found the robustness of our model, with a wider range of applicability in diverse dataset related to COVID-19. Additionally, we have found that omics-based models performed better than image or physiological feature-based models, proving the importance of the omics-based dataset for future model development. Conclusions This study diagnoses COVID-19 positive cases and predicts accurate severity levels. It lowers the dependence on clinical data and professional judgment, by leveraging the utilization of state-of-the-art models. our model showed wider applicability across different omics dataset, which is highly transferable in other respiratory or similar diseases. Hospital and public health care mechanisms can optimize the distribution of medical resources and improve the robustness of the medical system.

Optoelectric biosensors measure the conformational changes of biomolecules and their molecular interactions, allowing researchers to use them in different biomedical diagnostics and analysis activities. Among different biosensors, surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-based biosensors utilize label-free and gold-based plasmonic principles with high precision and accuracy, allowing these gold-based biosensors as one of the preferred methods. The dataset generated from these biosensors are being used in different machine learning (ML) models for disease diagnosis and prognosis, but there is a scarcity of models to develop or assess the accuracy of SPR-based biosensors and ensure a reliable dataset for downstream model development. Current study proposed innovative ML-based DNA detection and classification models from the reflective light angles on different gold surfaces of biosensors and associated properties. We have conducted several statistical analyses and different visualization techniques to evaluate the SPR-based dataset and applied t-SNE feature extraction and min-max normalization to differentiate classifiers of low-variances. We experimented with several ML classifiers, namely support vector machine (SVM), decision tree (DT), multi-layer perceptron (MLP), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), logistic regression (LR) and random forest (RF) and evaluated our findings in terms of different evaluation metrics. Our analysis showed the best accuracy of 0.94 by RF, DT and KNN for DNA classification and 0.96 by RF and KNN for DNA detection tasks. Considering area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) (0.97), precision (0.96) and F1-score (0.97), we found RF performed best for both tasks. Our research shows the potentiality of ML models in the field of biosensor development, which can be expanded to develop novel disease diagnosis and prognosis tools in the future.