Bioengineering

An emerging view of neural geometry in motor cortex supports high-performance decoding

1. Sean M Perkins
2. Elom A Amematsro
3. John Cunningham
4. Qi Wang
5. Mark M Churchland

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This paper presents a new method called MINT that is effective at BCI-style decoding tasks. The authors show convincing evidence to support their claims regarding how MINT is a new method that produces excellent decoding performance relative to the state-of-the-art. This work is important and will be of broad interest to neuroscientists and neuroengineers.

Reviewed by eLife

Clinical phenotypes in acute and chronic infarction explained through human ventricular electromechanical modelling and simulations

1. Xin Zhou
2. Zhinuo Jenny Wang
3. Julia Camps
4. Jakub Tomek
5. Alfonso Santiago
6. Adria Quintanas
7. Mariano Vazquez
8. Marmar Vaseghi
9. Blanca Rodriguez

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This computational study integrates detailed electrophysiology and mechanical contraction predictions, which are often modeled separately. The findings of this important work are that abnormal ECGs that are associated with higher risk of sudden cardiac death are predicted to have almost no relationship with left ventricular ejection fraction, which is conventionally used as a risk factor for arrhythmia. The conclusions are based on compelling evidence for the need of incorporating additional risk factors for assessing post-myocardial infarction patients.

Reviewed by eLife

Evaluation of Machine Learning-Assisted Directed Evolution Across Diverse Combinatorial Landscapes

1. Francesca-Zhoufan Li
2. Jason Yang
3. Kadina E. Johnston
4. Emre Gürsoy
5. Yisong Yue
6. Frances H. Arnold

Reviewed by Arcadia Science

Applied tutorial for the design and fabrication of biomicrofluidic devices by resin 3D printing

1. Hannah.B. Musgrove
2. Megan.A. Catterton
3. Rebecca.R. Pompano

Reviewed by Arcadia Science

The flexible stalk domain of sTREM2 modulates its interactions with brain-based phospholipids

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

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. Yoshikazu Kawai
14. Masafumi Umekage
15. Tomoaki M Kato
16. Michiya Noguchi
17. Koji Nakade
18. Yukio Nakamura
19. Tomoyuki Nakaishi
20. Naoki Nishishita
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

High-throughput expansion microscopy enables scalable super-resolution imaging

1. John H Day
2. Catherine M 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, a 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. Wei Zhao
5. Qiyuan Peng
6. Chunbo Liu
7. Ziqian Wan
8. Yiyi Cao
9. Xiang Chen
10. 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