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Category: bioengineering – Page 17

MIT method enables ultrafast protein labeling of tens of millions of densely packed cells

A new technology developed at MIT enables scientists to label proteins across millions of individual cells in fully intact 3D tissues with unprecedented speed, uniformity, and versatility. Using the technology, the team was able to richly label large tissue samples in a single day. In their new study in Nature Biotechnology, they also demonstrate that the ability to label proteins with antibodies at the single-cell level across large tissue samples can reveal insights left hidden by other widely used labeling methods.

Profiling the proteins that cells are making is a staple of studies in biology, neuroscience, and related fields because the proteins a cell is expressing at a given moment can reflect the functions the cell is trying to perform or its response to its circumstances, such as disease or treatment. As much as microscopy and labeling technologies have advanced, enabling innumerable discoveries, scientists have still lacked a reliable and practical way of tracking protein expression at the level of millions of densely packed individual cells in whole, 3D intact tissues. Often confined to thin tissue sections under slides, scientists therefore haven’t had tools to thoroughly appreciate cellular protein expression in the whole, connected systems in which it occurs.

“Conventionally, investigating the molecules within cells requires dissociating tissue into single cells or slicing it into thin sections, as light and chemicals required for analysis cannot penetrate deep into tissues. Our lab developed technologies such as CLARITY and SHIELD, which enable investigation of whole organs by rendering them transparent, but we now needed a way to chemically label whole organs to gain useful scientific insights,” says study senior author Kwanghun Chung, associate professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the departments of Chemical Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT. “If cells within a tissue are not uniformly processed, they cannot be quantitatively compared. In conventional protein labeling, it can take weeks for these molecules to diffuse into intact organs, making uniform chemical processing of organ-scale tissues virtually impossible and extremely slow.”

Minecraft players can now explore whole cells and their contents

Scientists have translated nanoscale experimental and computational data into precise 3D representations of bacteria, yeast and human epithelial, breast and breast cancer cells in Minecraft, a video game that allows players to explore, build and manipulate structures in three dimensions.

The innovation will allow researchers and students of all ages to navigate biological cells, puncturing through the membranes of organelles to view their interiors or wandering across the cytoplasm to see how the various structures are distributed within the cell.

“CraftCells: A Window into Biological Cells” is the first broadly accessible tool allowing users to get an accurate picture of whole cells in 3D, said Zaida (Zan) Luthey-Schulten, a professor of chemistry and of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the work with Illinois bioengineering professors Stephen Boppart and Rohit Bhargava, graduate student Kevin Tan, postdoctoral researchers Zane Thornburg and Seth Kenkel, and study lead author Tianyu Wu, a biophysics graduate student at the U. of I.

Scientists recode the genome for programmable synthetic proteins

Synthetic biologists from Yale were able to re-write the genetic code of an organism—a novel genomically recoded organism (GRO) with one stop codon—using a cellular platform that they developed enabling the production of new classes of synthetic proteins. These synthetic proteins, researchers say, offer the promise of innumerable medical and industrial applications that can benefit society and human health.

The creation of the landmark GRO, known as “Ochre”—which fully compresses redundant, or “degenerate” codons, into a single codon—is described in a new study published in the journal Nature. A codon is a sequence of three nucleotides in DNA or RNA that codes for a specific amino acid, which serves as the biochemical building blocks for proteins.

“This research allows us to ask fundamental questions about the malleability of genetic codes,” said Farren Isaacs, professor of molecular, cellular and at Yale School of Medicine and of biomedical engineering at Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who is co-senior author of the paper. “It also demonstrates the ability to engineer the genetic code to endow multi-functionality into proteins and usher in a new era of programmable biotherapeutics and biomaterials.”

Researchers Engineer Living Materials With Unique Properties

Rice University researchers have revealed novel sequence-structure-property relationships for customizing engineered living materials (ELMs), enabling more precise control over their structure and how they respond to deformation forces like stretching or compression.

The study, published in a special issue of ACS Synthetic Biology, focuses on altering protein matrices, which are the networks of proteins that provide structure to ELMs. By introducing small genetic changes, the team discovered they could make a substantial difference in how these materials behaved. These findings could open doors for advancements in tissue engineering, drug delivery and even 3D printing of living devices.

“We are engineering cells to create customizable materials with unique properties,” said Caroline Ajo-Franklin, professor of biosciences and the study’s corresponding author. “While synthetic biology has given us tools to tweak these properties, the connection between genetic sequence, material structure and behavior has been largely unexplored until now.”

Molecular switch reverses cancerous transformation at the critical moment of transition

Professor Kwang-Hyun Cho’s research team of the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering at KAIST has captured the critical transition phenomenon at the moment when normal cells change into cancer cells and analyzed it to discover a molecular switch hidden in the genetic network that can revert cancer cells back into normal cells.

The team’s findings are published in the journal Advanced Science.

A critical transition is a phenomenon in which a sudden change in state occurs at a specific point in time, like water changing into steam at 100℃. This critical transition phenomenon also occurs in the process in which change into at a specific point in time due to the accumulation of genetic and .

Smart robotic wheelchair offers enhanced autonomy and control

Recent advances in the fields of human-infrastructure interaction, electronic engineering, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) have opened new possibilities for the development of assistive and medical technologies. These include devices that can assist individuals with both physical and cognitive disabilities, supporting them throughout their daily activities.

Researchers at the University of Michigan recently developed CoNav, a smart controlled via a Robot Operating System (ROS) based framework. The new wheelchair, presented in a paper on the arXiv preprint server, could help to improve the quality of life of individuals who are temporarily or permanently unable to walk, allowing them to move in their surroundings more intuitively and autonomously.

“The inspiration for this work stems from a broader challenge in assistive mobility for people with disabilities (PWD),” Vineet Kamat, senior author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.

Researchers use unconventional method to help solve issue plaguing crops around the world: ‘Our research [has] remarkable potential’

New genetic research from the University of Florida may help make key crops such as potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers more resistant to disease and environmentally resilient as well as increase their nutritional value.

“Our research illustrates the remarkable potential of combining deep taxonomic expertise with cutting-edge biotechnology,” author Fabio Pasin told the Chinese Academy of Sciences, via Phys.org. “By focusing on the Solanaceae family, we can enhance not only widely recognized crops but also bring underutilized species into the agricultural mainstream, improving food security and enriching nutritional diversity across the globe.”

Researchers used recombinant virus technologies to give new breeds of plants particular traits. This method is very specific about promoting certain traits in new breeds. Scary as it might sound to use an engineered virus to change the DNA of our food, it’s a way of improving biodiversity in agriculture when farming has become more and more homogeneous and thus vulnerable.