We have successfully developed minimally-invasive needle-free bubble-injector designed for usage in air. The novelty is that minimally-invasiveness of injection whose resolution is less than 10 m, and hence cellular-scale and painless injection can be obtained. The bubble-injector can be employed to any kind of materials with wide range of hardness using strong impact of cavitation. The fine adjustment of invasiveness of injection can be controlled by the number of applied electric pulses. The developed injector can be used for wide range of biomedical study, especially in gene therapy.
Efficient use of seed nutrient reserves is crucial for germination and establishment of plant seedlings. Mobilizing seed oil reserves in Arabidopsis involves β-oxidation, the glyoxylate cycle, and gluconeogenesis, which provide essential energy and the carbon skeletons needed to sustain seedling growth until photoautotrophy is acquired. We demonstrated that H(+)-PPase activity is required for gluconeogenesis. Lack of H(+)-PPase in fugu5 mutants increases cytosolic pyrophosphate (PPi) levels, which partially reduces sucrose synthesis de novo and inhibits cell division. In contrast, post-mitotic cell expansion in cotyledons was unusually enhanced, a phenotype called compensation. Therefore, it appears that PPi inhibits several cellular functions, including cell cycling, to trigger compensated cell enlargement (CCE). Here, we mutagenized fugu5-1 seeds with (12)C(6+) heavy-ion irradiation and screened mutations that restrain CCE to gain insight into the genetic pathway(s) involved in CCE. We isolated A#3-1, in which cell size was severely reduced, but cell number remained similar to that of original fugu5-1. Moreover, cell number decreased in A#3-1 single mutant (A#3-1sm), similar to that of fugu5-1, but cell size was almost equal to that of the wild type. Surprisingly, A#3-1 mutation did not affect CCE in other compensation exhibiting mutant backgrounds, such as an3-4 and fugu2-1/fas1-6. Subsequent map-based cloning combined with genome sequencing and HRM curve analysis identified enoyl-CoA hydratase 2 (ECH2) as the causal gene of A#3-1. The above phenotypes were consistently observed in the ech2-1 allele and supplying sucrose restored the morphological and cellular phenotypes in fugu5-1, ech2-1, A#3-1sm, fugu5-1 ech2-1, and A#3-1; fugu5-1. Taken together, these results suggest that defects in either H(+)-PPase or ECH2 compromise cell proliferation due to defects in mobilizing seed storage lipids. In contrast, ECH2 alone likely promotes CCE during the post-mitotic cell expansion stage of cotyledon development, probably by converting indolebutyric acid to indole acetic acid.
Abstract Histotripsy is a non-invasive high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) based therapy using the mechanical effect of cavitation bubbles. In this paper, we experimentally examined the effectiveness of a proposed method of scanning the HIFU focus in the direction of propagation to expand the region of the bubble cloud and increase the treatment throughput. First, the continuous generation of cavitation bubbles was observed with a high-speed camera, and it was confirmed that the region of bubble cloud generation could be expanded by focus scanning. Next, we performed ex vivo experiments. Tissue treated with histotripsy is disrupted and homogenized at the subcellular level, resulting in a decrease in the backscatter intensity of the ultrasound. Therefore, we observed the progression of tissue homogenization with histotripsy by evaluating the reduction of echo intensity in ultrasound imaging. The results suggest that focus scanning can improve the time efficiency of treatment.
The effect of two stage deformation on ferrite transformation has been investigated by in situ neutron diffraction. Deformation induced ferrite transformation was found not only in the first stage compression but also in the secondary compression. The secondary compression was found to accelerate ferrite transformation even after the first compression effect disappeared. During the secondary compression, ferrite (110) diffraction intensity decreased by the evolution of compression texture of ferrite, while the integrated diffraction intensity of ferrite (110) was increased due to accelerated ferrite transformation. Hence, multi-stage or continuous deformation must be very effective to promote ferrite transformation.
A novel ilmenite-type compound, ZnVO 3 , has been synthesized under a high-pressure condition. This study highlights the presence of V–V dimers and Zn–Zn dimer-like displacements, as well as the remarkable thermal stability of the V–V bond in ZnVO 3 .
Blood vessels are the site for gas exchange and nutrient exchange between blood and peripheral tissues. Blood vessels are also the major pathway of cancer metastasis and become disordered under pathological conditions. Understanding the function of blood vessels under physiological or pathological conditions is important for developing new strategies for treatment of diseases. Recently, in vitro systems called microphysiological system (MPS) mimicking living tissues on the micro level have gained attention as a tool in visualizing cellular dynamics in 3D microenvironment with controlling over physical and chemical parameters, both of which are difficult to be controlled in animal experiments and conventional 2D in vitro systems. In this article, we introduce recent breakthroughs on blood vessel study using in vitro microvessel models.
In this paper, we deal with the area patrolling by an autonomous mobile robot. For the robot, the patrolling mission is to detect visitors as many as possible. For this mission, we have thus far assumed static visitors in an environment. On the other hand, we propose a novel patrolling strategy in consideration of moving visitors. Therefore, we focus on target destinations of the visitors. Thus the robot is allowed to mainly patrol the destinations. For this purpose, we use a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) . Through the simulation experiments, we discuss the effectiveness of the proposed patrolling strategy based on the HMM.
