IDBR-B: Precise Oxygen Landscapes for Cells and Tissues in Culture

IDBR-B：培养细胞和组织的精确氧气景观

• 批准号: 1253060
• 负责人: David Eddington
• 金额: $ 59.79万
• 依托单位: University of Illinois at Chicago
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-06-01 至 2017-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1253060&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: IDBR; Precise; Oxygen; Landscapes; Cells

An award is made to the University of Illinois at Chicago to develop a new platform to control dissolved gasses in cellular cultures. Current methods to do this are imprecise and create limitation in new discoveries of basic cellular biology. Our oxygen platform leverages rapid diffusion found at the microscale to expose cells or tissues to various oxygen landscapes as defined by the buried microfluidic gas networks. There are three key innovations with our platform. 1) The culture area is large enough to harvest enough cellular material to process with standard biological assays such as Western blots, PCR analysis, or flow cytometry. 2) The platform is easily suited for live-cell imaging under hypoxia in the absence of shear flow which is currently not possible or exceedingly cumbersome. 3) The platform equilibrates in minutes instead of hours (an order of magnitude improvement), allows rapid oxygen condition modulation, and allows new oxygen landscapes to be exposed across samples that would not be possible with standard methods. Together, these innovations should allow our platform to replace the current methods for oxygen modulation and facilitate new investigations currently limited by costly or imprecise equipment. The platform developed under this proposal will create a suite of tools to probe a previously difficult to control variable and enhance experimental efficiency. There is a tremendous need and demand for improved methods of oxygen control in the biomedical research community. This is based on the initial response we have received when discussing with potential collaborators and dearth of comparable methods. The educational objectives of this proposal aim to develop interest for science and engineering through exposure of elementary students to interactive laboratory activities at the University of Illinois at Chicago. We will target at risk elementary school students by working with the Girl Scouts of Chicago to provide positive experiences with science and engineering in the years before their impressions are set. Program evaluation will include both formative feedback, which will allow us to adjust our methods as we learn from the activities, and a summative appraisal of whether the stated goals have been met. We will have interactive lab activities involved with cell biology and basic processing with the Arduino platform, both of which are integrated into the research objectives of this proposal. Specifically, scouts will spend a day at UIC and work with female graduate students to demonstrate the excitement, creativity, and innovation found in research.

伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校获得了一个奖项，以开发一个新的平台来控制细胞培养中的溶解气体。目前这样做的方法是不精确的，并在基础细胞生物学的新发现中产生限制。我们的氧气平台利用在微尺度上发现的快速扩散，将细胞或组织暴露于由掩埋的微流体气体网络定义的各种氧气景观。我们的平台有三大创新。1)培养区域足够大，以收获足够的细胞材料，以用标准生物测定法如蛋白质印迹、PCR分析或流式细胞术进行处理。2)该平台很容易适用于缺氧条件下的活细胞成像，而目前不可能或非常繁琐的剪切流。3)该平台在几分钟内而不是几小时内达到平衡（数量级的改进），允许快速氧气条件调节，并允许在标准方法无法实现的样品中暴露新的氧气景观。总之，这些创新将使我们的平台能够取代目前的氧气调节方法，并促进目前受昂贵或不精确设备限制的新研究。根据该提议开发的平台将创建一套工具来探测以前难以控制的变量并提高实验效率。在生物医学研究领域，对氧气控制的改进方法存在巨大的需求。这是基于我们在与潜在合作者讨论时收到的初步答复以及缺乏可比方法。本提案的教育目标旨在通过让小学生接触芝加哥伊利诺伊大学的互动实验室活动来培养对科学和工程的兴趣。我们将与芝加哥的女童子军合作，以风险小学生为目标，在他们的印象形成之前的几年里提供科学和工程方面的积极经验。计划评估将包括形成性反馈，这将使我们能够调整我们的方法，因为我们从活动中学习，并总结评估是否达到了既定的目标。我们将有涉及细胞生物学和Arduino平台基本处理的交互式实验室活动，这两者都集成到本提案的研究目标中。具体来说，童子军将在UIC度过一天，与女研究生一起展示研究中发现的兴奋，创造力和创新。