Prospective Design, Rapid Prototyping, and Testing of Smart Dressings, Drug Delivery Patches, and Replacement Body Parts Using Microscopy Aided Design and ManufacturE (MADAME).

Natural materials exhibit smart properties including gradients in biophysical properties that engender higher order functions, as well as stimuli-responsive properties which integrate sensor and/or actuator capacities. Elucidation of mechanisms underpinning such smart material properties (i), and translation of that understanding (ii), represent two of the biggest challenges in emulating natural design paradigms for design and manufacture of disruptive materials, parts, and products. Microscopy Aided Design And ManufacturE (MADAME) stands for a computer-aided additive manufacturing platform that incorporates multidimensional (multi-D) printing and computer-controlled weaving.

Biotechnologies toward Mitigating, Curing, and Ultimately Preventing Edema through Compression Therapy.

For a century-old problem, edema and its treatment have gone remarkably unnoticed by the biomedical community. Given the prevalence of lymphedema and its debilitating repercussions, there is an acute need for both efficacy-based measures and clinical standards to guide compression garment design and therapeutic application. This review outlines the current state of the art in compression treatment and suggests an integrated biomedical engineering approach going forward.

Identification of UT-A1- and AQP2-interacting proteins in rat inner medullary collecting duct.

The urea channel UT-A1 and the water channel aquaporin-2 (AQP2) mediate vasopressin-regulated transport in the renal inner medullary collecting duct (IMCD). To identify the proteins that interact with UT-A1 and AQP2 in native rat IMCD cells, we carried out chemical cross-linking followed by detergent solubilization, immunoprecipitation, and LC-MS/MS analysis of the immunoprecipitated material. The analyses revealed 133 UT-A1-interacting proteins and 139 AQP2-interacting proteins, each identified in multiple replicates.

Creating High-Resolution Multiscale Maps of Human Tissue Using Multi-beam SEM.

Multi-beam scanning electron microscopy (mSEM) enables high-throughput, nano-resolution imaging of macroscopic tissue samples, providing an unprecedented means for structure-function characterization of biological tissues and their cellular inhabitants, seamlessly across multiple length scales. Here we describe computational methods to reconstruct and navigate a multitude of high-resolution mSEM images of the human hip. We calculated cross-correlation shift vectors between overlapping images and used a mass-spring-damper model for optimal global registration.

Organ-to-Cell-Scale Health Assessment Using Geographical Information System Approaches with Multibeam Scanning Electron Microscopy.

This study combines novel multibeam electron microscopy with a geographical information system approach to create a first, seamless, navigable anatomic map of the human hip and its cellular inhabitants. Using spatial information acquired by localizing relevant map landmarks (e.g.

The Effect of Residual Endotoxin Contamination on the Neuroinflammatory Response to Sterilized Intracortical Microelectrodes.

A major limitation to the use of microelectrode technologies in both research and clinical applications is our inability to consistently record high quality neural signals. There is increasing evidence that recording instability is linked, in part, to neuroinflammation. A number of factors including extravasated blood products and macrophage released soluble factors are believed to mediate neuroinflammation and the resulting recording instability.

Murray's Law in elastin haploinsufficient (Eln+/-) and wild-type (WT) mice.

Using either the principle of minimum energy or constant shear stress, a relation can be derived that predicts the diameters of branching vessels at a bifurcation. This relation, known as Murray's Law, has been shown to predict vessel diameters in a variety of cardiovascular systems from adult humans to developing chicks. The goal of this study is to investigate Murray's Law in vessels from mice that are haploinsufficient for the elastin protein (Eln+/-).