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

伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校被授予开发一种控制细胞培养中溶解气体的新平台。目前的方法是不精确的，并且在基础细胞生物学的新发现中造成了限制。我们的氧气平台利用在微尺度上发现的快速扩散，将细胞或组织暴露在由埋藏的微流体气体网络定义的各种氧气环境中。我们的平台有三个关键创新。1)培养区足够大，可以采集足够的细胞物质，用于标准的生物学检测，如蛋白质印迹分析、聚合酶链式反应分析或流式细胞术。2)在没有剪切流的情况下，该平台很容易适合于低氧下的活细胞成像，而剪切流目前是不可能的，或者非常笨重。3)该平台在几分钟内达到平衡，而不是几小时(改进了一个数量级)，允许快速调节氧气条件，并允许在样品中暴露新的氧气景观，这是标准方法无法实现的。总而言之，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。根据这一建议开发的平台将创建一套工具来探索以前难以控制的变量，并提高实验效率。在生物医学研究界，存在着对改进氧气控制方法的巨大需求和需求。这是基于我们在与潜在合作者讨论时收到的初步答复，以及缺乏可比的方法。这项提议的教育目标旨在通过让小学生参与伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校的互动实验室活动来培养学生对科学和工程的兴趣。我们将以高危小学生为目标，与芝加哥女童子军合作，在他们的印象确立之前的几年里，提供他们在科学和工程方面的积极经验。计划评估将包括形成性反馈，这将使我们能够在从活动中学习时调整我们的方法，以及对所述目标是否已达到的总结性评估。我们将与Arduino平台进行涉及细胞生物学和基础加工的互动实验室活动，这两者都被整合到本提案的研究目标中。具体地说，童子军将在UIC呆一天，并与女研究生合作，展示研究中发现的兴奋、创造力和创新。

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.