Project description:We quantify the effects of electrical stimulation on murine cells at the cellular and transcriptomic level using single cell RNA-sequencing. We characterize circulating cells and compare them to unstimulated circulating cells.
Project description:Gas sensors present an alternative to traditional off-package food quality assessment, due to their high sensitivity and fast response without the need of sample pretreatment. The safe integration of gas sensors into packaging without compromising sensitivity, response rate, and stability, however, remains a challenge. Such packaging integration of spoilage sensors is crucial for preventing food waste and transitioning toward more sustainable supply chains. Here, we demonstrate a wide-ranging solution to enable the use of gas sensors for the continuous monitoring of food spoilage, building upon our previous work on paper-based electrical gas sensors (PEGS). By comparing various materials commonly used in the food industry, we analyze the optimal membrane to encapsulate PEGS for packaging integration. Focusing on spinach as a high-value crop, we assess the feasibility of PEGS to monitor the gases released during its spoilage at low and room temperatures. Finally, we integrated the sensors with wireless communication and batteryless electronics, creating a user-friendly system to evaluate the spoilage of spinach, operated by a smartphone via near-field communication (NFC). The work reported here provides an alternative approach that surpasses traditional on-site and in-line monitoring, ensuring comprehensive monitoring of food shelf life.
Project description:Recent advances in wearable electronics combined with wireless communications are essential to the realization of medical applications through health monitoring technologies. For example, a smart contact lens, which is capable of monitoring the physiological information of the eye and tear fluid, could provide real-time, noninvasive medical diagnostics. However, previous reports concerning the smart contact lens have indicated that opaque and brittle components have been used to enable the operation of the electronic device, and this could block the user's vision and potentially damage the eye. In addition, the use of expensive and bulky equipment to measure signals from the contact lens sensors could interfere with the user's external activities. Thus, we report an unconventional approach for the fabrication of a soft, smart contact lens in which glucose sensors, wireless power transfer circuits, and display pixels to visualize sensing signals in real time are fully integrated using transparent and stretchable nanostructures. The integration of this display into the smart lens eliminates the need for additional, bulky measurement equipment. This soft, smart contact lens can be transparent, providing a clear view by matching the refractive indices of its locally patterned areas. The resulting soft, smart contact lens provides real-time, wireless operation, and there are in vivo tests to monitor the glucose concentration in tears (suitable for determining the fasting glucose level in the tears of diabetic patients) and, simultaneously, to provide sensing results through the contact lens display.
Project description:The aim of the study is to identify a pattern of chemoresistive sensors able to recognise the presence of a tumoral pathology from a health state through the analysis of Volatile Organic Compounds inside the specimen.
The chemoresistive nanostructured sensors are into an innovative patented device SCENT B1 which can analyse different specimens: blood samples, tissue biopsies, cell cultures.
In this study SCENT B1 wil be used to compare the measures of:
* tumoral and health tissues taken from different neoplasms after their surgical resection
* blood samples from healthy and tumor affected people
* pre and post- operative blood samples of tumor affected people
Project description:Metabolic sensors are microbial strains modified such that biomass formation correlates with the availability of specific target metabolites. These sensors are essential for bioengineering (e.g. in growth-coupled selection of synthetic pathways), but their design is often time-consuming and low-throughput. In contrast, in silico analysis can accelerate their development. We present a systematic workflow for designing, implementing, and testing versatile metabolic sensors using Escherichia coli as a model. Glyoxylate, a key metabolite in synthetic CO2 fixation and carbon-conserving pathways, served as the test molecule. Through iterative screening of a compact metabolic reconstruction, we identified non-trivial growth-coupled designs that resulted in six metabolic sensors with different glyoxylate-to-biomass ratios. These metabolic sensors had a linear correlation between biomass formation and glyoxylate concentration spanning three orders of magnitude and were further adapted for glycolate sensing. We demonstrate the utility of these sensors in pathway engineering (implementing a synthetic route for one-carbon assimilation via glyoxylate) and environmental applications (quantifying glycolate produced by photosynthetic microalgae). The versatility and ease of implementation of this workflow make it suitable for designing and building multiple metabolic sensors for diverse biotechnological applications.