Semaphorin-3A regulates liver sinusoidal endothelial cell porosity and promotes hepatic steatosis.

Prevalence of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), formerly known as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, increases worldwide and associates with type 2 diabetes and other cardiometabolic diseases. Here we demonstrate that Sema3a is elevated in liver sinusoidal endothelial cells of animal models for obesity, type 2 diabetes and MASLD. In primary human liver sinusoidal endothelial cells, saturated fatty acids induce expression of SEMA3A, and loss of a single allele is sufficient to reduce hepatic fat content in diet-induced obese mice.

Generative Modelling of Cortical Receptor Distributions from Cytoarchitectonic Images in the Macaque Brain.

Neurotransmitter receptor densities are relevant for understanding the molecular architecture of brain regions. Quantitative in vitro receptor autoradiography, has been introduced to map neurotransmitter receptor distributions of brain areas. However, it is very time and cost-intensive, which makes it challenging to obtain whole-brain distributions.

Effect of in-plane and out-of-plane bifurcated microfluidic channels on the flow of aggregating red blood cells.

The blood flow through our microvascular system is a renowned difficult process to understand because the complex flow behavior of blood is intertwined with the complex geometry it has to flow through. Conventional 2D microfluidics has provided important insights, but progress is hampered by the limitation of 2-D confinement. Here we use selective laser-induced etching to excavate non-planar 3-D microfluidic channels in glass that consist of two generations of bifurcations, heading towards more physiological geometries.

The multimodality cell segmentation challenge: toward universal solutions.

Cell segmentation is a critical step for quantitative single-cell analysis in microscopy images. Existing cell segmentation methods are often tailored to specific modalities or require manual interventions to specify hyper-parameters in different experimental settings. Here, we present a multimodality cell segmentation benchmark, comprising more than 1,500 labeled images derived from more than 50 diverse biological experiments.

A framework to improve the alignment of individual cytoarchitectonic maps of the Julich-Brain atlas using cortical folding landmarks.

The segregation of the cortical mantle into cytoarchitectonic areas provides a structural basis for the specialization of different brain regions. In vivo neuroimaging experiments can be linked to this postmortem cytoarchitectonic parcellation via Julich-Brain. This atlas embeds probabilistic maps that account for inter-individual variability in the localization of cytoarchitectonic areas in the reference spaces targeted by spatial normalization.