Building Synthetic Cells─From the Technology Infrastructure to Cellular Entities.

The construction of a living organism is a compelling vision. Despite the astonishing technologies developed to modify living cells, building a functioning cell "from scratch" has yet to be accomplished. The pursuit of this goal alone has─and will─yield scientific insights affecting fields as diverse as cell biology, biotechnology, medicine, and astrobiology.

Design and proof-of-concept evaluation of a touchless connector system for preventing peritoneal dialysis-associated peritonitis.

Introduction: In this paper, we describe the design of a touchless peritoneal dialysis connector system and how we evaluated its potential for preventing peritoneal dialysis-associated peritonitis, in comparison to the standard of care. The unique feature of this system is an enclosure within which patients can connect and disconnect for therapy, protecting their peritoneal catheters from touch or aerosols.

Methods: We simulated a worst-case contamination scenario by spraying 40mL of a standardized inoculum [ 1×10 colony-forming units (CFU) per milliliter] of test organisms, ATCC1228 and ATCC39327, while test participants made mock connections for therapy.