Human placental stem cell-based therapies for prevention of abdominal adhesions: A prospective randomized preclinical trial.

Background: Abdominal adhesions are networks of fibrotic tissues that form between organs postoperatively. Current prophylactic strategies do not reproducibly prevent adhesive small bowel obstruction across the entire abdomen. Human placental-derived stem cells produce an anti-inflammatory secretome that has been applied to multiple fibrosing diseases.

Highly multiplexed fluorescence microscopy with spectrally tunable semiconducting polymer dots.

Current studies of biological tissues require visualizing diverse cell types and molecular interactions, creating a growing need for versatile techniques to simultaneously probe numerous targets. Traditional multiplexed imaging is limited to around five targets at once. Emerging methods using sequential rounds of staining, imaging, and signal removal can probe tens of targets but require specialized hardware and time-consuming workflows and face challenges with sample distortion and artifacts.

Nanoscale Optical Imaging, Reconstruction, and Spatial Analysis of Whole Mouse Glomeruli.

Renal glomeruli have traditionally been studied by micrometer-scale optical microscopy to interrogate overall physiology or molecular distributions and by nanoscale electron microscopy to interrogate the ultrastructure of thin sections. While these approaches are powerful, they have been limited in their ability to obtain detailed views of the glomeruli as holistic 3D functional units. To fill this knowledge gap, we have developed a novel pipeline for imaging, reconstructing, and analyzing whole mouse glomeruli at 100 nm resolution using super-resolution fluorescence microscopy.

Biophysical characterization of blood coagulation factor VIII binding to lipid nanodiscs that mimic activated platelet surfaces.

Background: Following proteolytic activation, activated blood coagulation factor (F)VIII (FVIIIa) binds to activated platelet membranes, forming the intrinsic tenase complex with activated FIX (FIXa). Previous studies have identified the C1 and C2 domains as the membrane binding domains of FVIII through conserved arginine residues. A membrane binding model for the FVIII C domains proposes that surface-exposed hydrophobic and positively charged residues at each C domain interact with the membrane, yet a comprehensive thermodynamic and structural description of this interaction is lacking.