Performance of islets of Langerhans conformally coated via an emulsion cross-linking method in diabetic rodents and nonhuman primates.

Polyethylene glycol (PEG)-based conformal coating (CC) encapsulation of transplanted islets is a promising β cell replacement therapy for the treatment of type 1 diabetes without chronic immunosuppression because it minimizes capsule thickness, graft volume, and insulin secretion delay. However, we show here that our original CC method, the direct method, requiring exposure of islets to low pH levels and inclusion of viscosity enhancers during coating, severely affected the viability, scalability, and biocompatibility of CC islets in nonhuman primate preclinical models of type 1 diabetes. We therefore developed and validated in vitro and in vivo, in several small- and large-animal models of type 1 diabetes, an augmented CC method-emulsion method-that achieves hydrogel CCs around islets at physiological pH for improved cytocompatibility, with PEG hydrogels for increased biocompatibility and with fivefold increase in encapsulation throughput for enhanced scalability.

MTNeuro: A Benchmark for Evaluating Representations of Brain Structure Across Multiple Levels of Abstraction.

There are multiple scales of abstraction from which we can describe the same image, depending on whether we are focusing on fine-grained details or a more global attribute of the image. In brain mapping, learning to automatically parse images to build representations of both small-scale features (e.g.

A High-Throughput Mass-Spectrometry-Based Assay for Identifying the Biochemical Functions of Putative Glycosidases.

The most commonly employed glycosidase assays rely on bulky ultraviolet or fluorescent tags at the anomeric position in potential carbohydrate substrates, thereby limiting the utility of these assays for broad substrate characterization. Here we report a qualitative mass spectrometry-based glycosidase assay amenable to high-throughput screening for the identification of the biochemical functions of putative glycosidases. The assay utilizes a library of methyl glycosides and is demonstrated on a high-throughput robotic liquid handling system for enzyme substrate screening.

A mass-differentiated library strategy for identification of sugar nucleotidyltransferase activities from cell lysates.

Sugar nucleotidyltransferases, or nucleotide sugar pyrophosphorylases, are ubiquitous enzymes whose activities have been correlated to disease states and pathogen virulence. Here we report a rapid "one-pot" method to identify a range of sugar nucleotidyltransferase activities of purified proteins or in cell lysates using a mass-differentiated carbohydrate library designed for mass spectrometry-based analysis.