Bioengineering

The flexible stalk domain of sTREM2 modulates its interactions with phospholipids in the brain

1. David Saeb
2. Emma E Lietzke
3. Daisy I Fuchs
4. Emma C Aldrich
5. Kimberley D Bruce
6. Kayla G Sprenger

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This useful manuscript addresses some key molecular mechanisms on the neuroprotective roles of soluble TREM2 in neurodegenerative diseases. Thw study will advance our understanding of TREM2 mutations, particularly on the damaging effect of known TREM2 mutations, and also explain why soluble TREM2 can antagonize Aβ aggregation. However, the primary experimental method, MD simulations, suffers from limited sampling, rendering the results incomplete for definite conclusions.

Reviewed by eLife

Semantical and Geometrical Protein Encoding Toward Enhanced Bioactivity and Thermostability

1. Yang Tan
2. Bingxin Zhou
3. Lirong Zheng
4. Guisheng Fan
5. Liang Hong

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  ProtSSN is a valuable approach that generates protein embeddings by integrating sequence and structural information, demonstrating improved prediction of mutation effects on thermostability compared to competing models. The evidence supporting the authors' claims is solid, with well-executed comparisons. This work will be of particular interest to researchers in bioinformatics and structural biology, especially those focused on protein function and stability.

Reviewed by eLife

Complete suspension culture of human induced pluripotent stem cells supplemented with suppressors of spontaneous differentiation

1. Mami Matsuo-Takasaki
2. Sho Kambayashi
3. Yasuko Hemmi
4. Tamami Wakabayashi
5. Tomoya Shimizu
6. Yuri An
7. Hidenori Ito
8. Kazuhiro Takeuchi
9. Masato Ibuki
10. Terasu Kawashima
11. Rio Masayasu
12. Manami Suzuki
13. Naoki Nishishita
14. Yoshikazu Kawai
15. Masafumi Umekage
16. Tomoaki M Kato
17. Michiya Noguchi
18. Koji Nakade
19. Yukio Nakamura
20. Tomoyuki Nakaishi
21. Masayoshi Tsukahara
22. Yohei Hayashi

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This comprehensive and compelling study presents a robust, cost-effective method for expanding pluripotent stem cells. The authors have identified a media condition that maintains iPSCs in suspension cultures by inhibiting the PKCβ and Wnt signaling pathways. The manuscript is important for the pluripotent stem cell field as it seeks robust and economical approaches to expand iPSCs at scale for high throughput screens and preclinical studies. While the authors have tested their media and protocol on a few lines, given the variability of iPSCs, further testing across more cell lines and in different laboratory settings will be crucial to evaluate its reproducibility.

Reviewed by eLife

HiExM: high-throughput expansion microscopy enables scalable super-resolution imaging

1. John H Day
2. Catherine Marin Della Santina
3. Pema Maretich
4. Alexander L Auld
5. Kirsten K Schnieder
6. Tay Shin
7. Edward S Boyden
8. Laurie A Boyer

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study develops a high throughput version of expansion microscopy that can be performed in 96-well plates. The engineered technology is convincing and compatible with standard microplates and automated microscopes and thus will be of broad interest. The application to hiPCS-derived cardiomyocytes treated with doxorubicin provides a solid proof-of-concept demonstrating the potential for high-throughput analysis.

Reviewed by eLife

Patch-walking: Coordinated multi-pipette patch clamp for efficiently finding synaptic connections

1. Mighten C Yip
2. Mercedes M Gonzalez
3. Colby F Lewallen
4. Corey R Landry
5. Ilya Kolb
6. Bo Yang
7. William M Stoy
8. Ming-fai Fong
9. Matthew JM Rowan
10. Edward S Boyden
11. Craig R Forest

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This technical study presents a novel sampling strategy for detecting synaptic coupling between neurons from dual pipette patch-clamp recordings in acute slices of mammalian brain tissue in vitro. The authors present solid evidence that this strategy, which incorporates automated patch clamp electrode positioning and cleaning for reuse with strategic neuron targeting, has the potential to substantially improve the efficiency of neuronal sampling with paired recordings. This technique and the extensions discussed will be useful for neuroscientists wanting to apply or already conducting automated multi-pipette patch clamp recording electrophysiology experiments in vitro for neuron connectivity analyses.

Reviewed by eLife

An automated microfluidic platform for toxicity testing based on Caenorhabditis elegans

1. Jiaying Wu
2. Jing Xi
3. Zhouhai Zhu
4. Qiyuan Peng
5. Chunbo Liu
6. Ziqian Wan
7. Yiyi Cao
8. Xiang Chen
9. Yang Luan

Reviewed by Arcadia Science

Development of a new genotype–phenotype linked antibody screening system

1. Takashi Watanabe
2. Hikaru Hata
3. Yoshiki Mochizuki
4. Fumie Yokoyama
5. Tomoko Hasegawa
6. Naveen Kumar
7. Tomohiro Kurosaki
8. Osamu Ohara
9. Hidehiro Fukuyama

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The useful studies described here are broadly applicable to all antibody discovery subfields, even though they are not a significant improvement over published methods. The findings are incomplete with respect to the methodology, since details that are crucial in order to repeat the experiments are lacking (such as a timestamp). They also do not take into account multiple recent papers that have tested similar strategies. These studies will be of interest to a specialized audience working on generating antibodies to infectious agents.

Reviewed by eLife

Engineered Nanotopographies Induce Transient Openings in the Nuclear Membrane

1. Einollah Sarikhani
2. Vrund Patel
3. Zhi Li
4. Dhivya Pushpa Meganathan
5. Keivan Rahmani
6. Leah Sadr
7. Ryan Hosseini
8. Diether Visda
9. Shivani Shukla
10. Hamed Naghsh-Nilchi
11. Adarsh Balaji
12. Gillian McMahon
13. Shaoming Chen
14. Johannes Schöneberg
15. Colleen A. McHugh
16. Lingyan Shi
17. Zeinab Jahed

Reviewed by preLights

Two mechanisms of photoenergy regulation revealed by kinetic behaviors of chlorophyll fluorescence during light adaptation

1. Junqing Chen
2. Lijiang Fu
3. Ya Guo
4. Jinglu Tan

Reviewed by Arcadia Science

A 3D-printed handheld device for quick citrus tissue lysis and nucleic acid extraction

1. Chia-Wei Liu
2. Brent Kalish
3. Sohrab Bodaghi
4. Georgios Vidalakis
5. Hideaki Tsutsui

Reviewed by Arcadia Science