Congratulations to former PBL members Ilya and Sitara on their wedding! This wedding was a particularly special day for our lab because the bride, groom, officiant, two of the groomsmen, and 2 of the guests are all either current or former PBL members!
President Cabrera stopped by the lab for a tour and was impressed by our neuroscience research as well as learning about the conception of the Inventure Prize, Invention Studio, and Create-X program. He even tweeted about @patcherBot on Twitter!
Congratulations to Mighten Yip for winning the Above and Beyond Entrepreneurship Award! Mighten is not only the CEO of a startup company, Neuromatic Devices, but he has also been spearheading the Atlanta chapter of Nucleate and involved with University Bioconnect events for promoting entrepreneurship in the local community!
Congratulations to Bo Yang, our research scientist, who won the 2022 IBB Above and Beyond Staff Award this year! Bo has been not only been instrumental in our own lab, but he has also helped train researchers from a myriad of labs across IBB!
Our lab won a $3.8M NIH grant in collaboration with the Rowan Lab at Emory University to use the patcherBot for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) research. We plan to explore the role of parvalbumin interneurons in AD progression. You can read more here.
Mohamed, Mercedes, Phoebe, and Mighten visited Colby and Athena in Washington DC over the summer!
“The Georgia Institute of Technology has been selected as the in-depth cell characterization platform hub for the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) Regenerative Medicine Innovation Project (RMIP). Established under the 21st Century Cures Act, the main goal of the $30 million RMIP is the development of transformative new therapies based on adult stem cells.” The Precision Biosystems Lab will play a key role in this hub with the characterization and measurement of epithelial cells. Read more here!
Dr. Colby Lewallen successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis this fall. His work focused on developing new methods for intracellular robotics and extracellular impedance spectroscopy!
Abstract: Epithelia are barrier-type cells that regulate the transport of materials into and out of the body. Dysfunction of these cells is implicated in numerous diseases such as cystic fibrosis, age-related macular degeneration, and diabetes. Since the discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), scientists around the world have utilized iPSC-based therapies to halt, and potentially reverse, the progression of these diseases. For epithelia-based therapies, validation of tissue polarity and function is an essential component of a thorough physiological exam, and are commonly performed electrochemically, but existing methods are some combination of (1) destructive to the cells, (2) incomplete, (3) extremely difficult, and (4) low throughput. Therefore, in this work, novel tools and measurement techniques were developed to study epithelial cell function that addresses these issues. For example, an algorithm that automates the insertion of a pipette into the cytoplasm of a cell was developed (Aim 1). This algorithm outperforms a highly trained expert at a much lower operator skill level; enabling more labs to explore the physiology, drug toxicity, and disease processes of epithelia. In addition, a new mathematical model was developed that combines a technique called electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) with intracellular voltage data to extract membrane-specific properties of epithelia (Aim 2). Furthermore, experimental data demonstrating an inverse relationship between tissue capacitance and the median cell cross-sectional area is presented (Aim 3). Finally, a mathematical link between membrane-specific properties of epithelia and the time constant ratio, a property that does not require intracellular voltage data, is derived and experimentally tested. This link can act as a bridge between the comprehensive, yet slow and invasive, intracellular measurements and the fast, yet simple, extracellular measurements of epithelial function (Aim 3).
Nina Sara Fraticelli-Guzman, a masters student in the lab, was featured in an article by Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). Her work as part of the SenSARS group involves concentrating bacteria and viruses, a crucial step in detecting SARS-Cov-2 from the air. You can read the full article here!
Dr. Corey Landry successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis this fall. His work focused on developing new methods for high throughput single cell analysis throughout intact human brain organoids!
Abstract: Human brain organoids, three-dimensional spheres of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs), have become widely used as a model system to study human neurodevelopment in recent years. Specifically, the model of intact (i.e., unsliced) brain organoids could present an ideal system for studying synaptic activity, spontaneous oscillations, and connectivity of developing neuronal networks in self-assembled tissues – opening the door to previously inaccessible windows of human neurodevelopment. As a gold standard single cell method, whole cell patch clamp is a critical tool in unraveling the physiology of neural tissues. In addition to capturing the millivolt- and millisecond-scale dynamics of neuronal cells, patch clamp also provides direct physical access to single cells in intact tissues allowing for the delivery and extraction of molecules such as dyes or genes. Critically, the delivery of intracellular dyes via patch clamp recording enables multidimensional characterization of single cells, including relationships between cellular structure and function. Despite this potential, the challenges of performing single cell studies in human brain organoids are substantial and have limited progress in this field. This work addresses these problems first by developing a method for cleaning and reuse of patch clamp pipettes that increases the throughput, scalability, and reproducibility of patch clamp recordings and second by developing a suite of methods for performing patch clamp measurements in intact human brain organoids. The result of this work is a set of scalable methods for patch clamp recordings and morphological reconstruction in intact brain organoids.
