An attractive option for tissue engineering is to use of multicellular spheroids as microtissues, particularly with stem cell spheroids. Conventional approaches of fabricating spheroids suffer from low throughput and polydispersity in size, and fail to supplement cues from extracellular matrix (ECM) for enhanced differentiation. In this study, we report the application of microfluidics-generate...

Balloon pumps are employed to assist cardiac function in cases of acute myocardial infarction, ventricular arrhythmias, cardiogenic shock, unstable angina, refractory failure, or surgery. Counterpulsation, through increasing the diastolic pressure and reducing systolic pressure, increases coronary perfusion assists heart pump more blood at each contraction. An expanding-contracting balloon, mod...

Isolated stromal cells from the ampullary and isthmic parts of bovine oviductal tissues were cultured in monolayer and spheroid (cell aggregate) systems. Prostaglandin F2α (PGF) plays a crucial role in oviductal contraction and is produced by oviductal epithelial cells in cattle. Since stromal cells of many organs produce PGF, PGF production by bovine oviductal stromal cells was investigated. A...

The electromagnetic fields scattered when a plane wave is incident on an oblate spheroid in the side-on orientation may be calculated using a generalization of Mie theory, and the results may be decomposed in a Debye series expansion. A number of optical caustics are observed in the computed scattered intensity for the one internal reflection portion of the Debye series for scattering angles in...

Redshift evolution of supermassive black hole mass functions (BHMFs) is investigated up to z ∼ 1. BHMFs at intermediate redshifts are calculated in two ways. One way is from early-type galaxy luminosity functions (LFs); we assume an MBH − Lsph correlation at a redshift by considering a passive evolution of Lsph in the local relationship. The resultant BHMFs (spheroid-BHMFs) from LFs of red sequ...

Using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the Hubble Space Telescope, we have obtained deep optical images reaching stars well below the oldest main sequence turnoff in three fields of the Andromeda Galaxy: the spheroid, tidal stream, and outer disk. These observations allow a complete reconstruction of the star formation history in these fields. We analyze the color-magnitude diagrams of ...

OBJECTIVE Gastric cancer (GC) is widely associated with chronic inflammation. The pro inflammatory microenvironment provides conditions that disrupt stem/progenitor cell proliferation and differentiation. The signal transducer and activator of transcrip- tion-3 (STAT3) signaling pathway is involved in inflammation and also contributes to the maintenance of embryonic stem cell (ESCs) pluripotenc...

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide as most patients often suffer cancer relapse. The reason is often attributed to the presence of cancer stem cells (CSCs). Recent studies revealed that dysregulation of microRNA (miRNA) are closely linked to breast cancer recurrence and metastasis. However, no specific study has comprehensively characterised the CSC ...

Chemotherapy treatment of cancer remains a challenge due to the molecular and functional heterogeneity displayed by tumours originating from the same cell type. The pronounced heterogeneity makes it difficult for oncologists to devise an effective therapeutic strategy for the patient. One approach for increasing treatment efficacy is to test the chemosensitivity of cancer cells obtained from th...

The multicellular spheroid model partly mimics tumor microenvironments in vivo and has been reported in plenty of studies regarding radiosensitivity. However, clear isolation of quiescent and proliferating cells in live conditions has been quite difficult owing to technical limitations; therefore, comprehensive characterization could not be done thus far. In this study, we succeeded in separate...