Recapitulation of Human Embryonic Heartbeat to Promote Differentiation of Hepatic Endoderm to Hepatoblasts.

Hepatic development requires multiple sequential physicochemical environmental changes in an embryo, and human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) allow for the elucidation of this embryonic developmental process. However, the current methods for hPSC-hepatic differentiation, which employ various biochemical substances, produce hPSC-derived hepatocytes with less functionality than primary hepatocytes, due to a lack of physical stimuli, such as heart beating. Here, we developed a microfluidic platform that recapitulates the beating of a human embryonic heart to improve the functionality of hepatoblasts derived from hepatic endoderm (HE) .

Intracortical Neural Stimulation With Untethered, Ultrasmall Carbon Fiber Electrodes Mediated by the Photoelectric Effect.

Objective: Neural stimulation with tethered, electrically activated probes is damaging to neural tissue and lacks good spatial selectivity and stable chronic performance. The photoelectric effect, which converts incident light into electric potential and heat, provides an opportunity for a tetherless stimulation method. We propose a novel stimulation paradigm that relies on the photoelectric effect to stimulate neurons around a free-floating, ultrasmall (7-8 μm diameter) carbon fiber probe.

Design Choices for Next-Generation Neurotechnology Can Impact Motion Artifact in Electrophysiological and Fast-Scan Cyclic Voltammetry Measurements.

Implantable devices to measure neurochemical or electrical activity from the brain are mainstays of neuroscience research and have become increasingly utilized as enabling components of clinical therapies. In order to increase the number of recording channels on these devices while minimizing the immune response, flexible electrodes under 10 µm in diameter have been proposed as ideal next-generation neural interfaces. However, the representation of motion artifact during neurochemical or electrophysiological recordings using ultra-small, flexible electrodes remains unexplored.

Tellurium: An extensible python-based modeling environment for systems and synthetic biology.

Unlabelled: Here we present Tellurium, a Python-based environment for model building, simulation, and analysis that facilitates reproducibility of models in systems and synthetic biology. Tellurium is a modular, cross-platform, and open-source simulation environment composed of multiple libraries, plugins, and specialized modules and methods. Tellurium is a self-contained modeling platform which comes with a fully configured Python distribution.