Search results for "SCOPE"

Development of novel functional ingredients: Need for testing systems and solutions with Caenorhabditis elegans

2016

Abstract Background Nutrition is increasingly understood as a means of maintaining health and well-being and the market for functional foods keeps growing in double-digits. Functional nutrition is seen by many as the interphase between food and pharmaceuticals. In fact, players from both sides are increasingly making moves in the form of strategic alliances, M&A operations and co-investments which are bringing the two realms closer together. Food regulations to prove safety of novel ingredients or to support health claims are every day more stringent and the general public is also increasingly informed about the science, risks and benefits of what they eat. All this presents a magnificent o…

2019

Purpose: Clear resection margins are paramount for good outcome in children undergoing solid tumor resections. Multiphoton microscopy (MPM) can provide high-resolution, real-time, intraoperative microscopic images of tumor tissue. Objective: This prospective international multicenter study evaluates the diagnostic accuracy, feasibility, and interobserver congruence of MPM in diagnosing solid pediatric tissue and tumors for the first time. Material and methods: Representative fresh sections from six different neonatal solid tissues (liver, lung, kidney, adrenal gland, heart muscle, testicle) and two types of typical pediatric solid tumors (neuroblastoma, rhabdomyosarcoma) with adjacent nonne…

Imaging Bacterial Colonies and Phage-Bacterium Interaction at Sub-Nanometer Resolution Using Helium-Ion Microscopy

2017

Imaging of microbial interactions has so far been based on well‐established electron microscopy methods. This study presents a new way to study bacterial colonies and interactions between bacteria and their viruses, bacteriophages (phages), in situ on agar plates using helium ion microscopy (HIM). In biological imaging, HIM has advantages over traditional scanning electron microscopy with its sub‐nanometer resolution, increased surface sensitivity, and the possibility to image nonconductive samples. Furthermore, by controlling the He beam dose or by using heavier Ne ions, the HIM instrument provides the possibility to mill out material in the samples, allowing for subsurface imaging and in …

Facilitation of Health Professionals Responsible Autonomy with Easy-to-Use Hospital Data Querying Language

2018

Support for the development of responsible autonomy as opposite to management that is based on direct control is found to be by far more effective approach in healthcare management, especially when it concerns physicians as the most influential group of health professionals. It is therefore important to obtain a process-oriented knowledge system where physicians would be able to autonomously answer questions which are outside the scope of pre-made direct control reports. However, the ad-hoc data querying process is slow and error-prone due to inability of health professionals to access data directly without involving IT experts. The problem lies in the complexity of means used to query data…

Effect of counting chamber depth on the accuracy of lensless microscopy for the assessment of boar sperm motility.

2017

Sperm motility is one of the most significant parameters in the prediction of male fertility. Until now, both motility analysis using an optical microscope and computer-aided sperm analysis (CASA-Mot) entailed the use of counting chambers with a depth to 20 µm. Chamber depth significantly affects the intrinsic sperm movement, leading to an artificial motility pattern. For the first time, laser microscopy offers the possibility of avoiding this interference with sperm movement. The aims of the present study were to determine the different motility patterns observed in chambers with depths of 10, 20 and 100 µm using a new holographic approach and to compare the results obtained in the 20-µm c…

Collagen-inducing biologization of prosthetic material for hernia repair: Polypropylene meshes coated with polyP/collagen

2017

Prostethic mesh material such as nonabsorbable polypropylene used in open and laparoscopic hernia repair are characterized by controllable mechanical properties but may elicit undesirable physiological reactions due to the nonphysiological inert polymer material. We succeeded in developing a biocompatible coating for these meshes, based on a physiological inorganic polymer, polyphosphate (polyP) that is morphogenetically active and used as a metabolic energy source, and a collagen matrix. The polyP/collagen hydrogel material was prepared by a freeze-extraction method, with amorphous Ca-polyP microparticles. Electron microscopy (SEM and REM) studies revealed that the polyP/collagen coats are…

Flexible multi-beam light-sheet fluorescence microscope for live imaging without striping artifacts

2018

The development of light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM) has greatly expanded the experimental capabilities in many biological and biomedical research fields, enabling for example live studies of murine and zebrafish neural activity or of cell growth and division. The key feature of the method is the selective illumination of a sample single plane, providing an intrinsic optical sectioning and allowing direct 2D image recording. On the other hand, this excitation scheme is more affected by absorption or scattering artifacts in comparison to point scanning methods, leading to un-even illumination. We present here an easily implementable method, based on acousto-optical deflectors (AOD),…

Tunable-frequency three-dimensional structured illumination microscopy with reduced data-acquisition

2018

The performance of a tunable three-dimensional (3D) structured illumination microscope (SIM) system and its ability to provide simultaneously super-resolution (SR) and optical-sectioning (OS) capabilities are investigated. Numerical results show that the performance of our 3D-SIM system is comparable with the one provided by a three-wave interference SIM, while requiring 40% fewer images for the reconstruction and providing frequency tunability in a cost-effective implementation. The performance of the system has been validated experimentally with images from test samples, which were also imaged with a commercial SIM based on incoherent-grid projection for comparison. Restored images from d…

Transformation of Amorphous Polyphosphate Nanoparticles into Coacervate Complexes: An Approach for the Encapsulation of Mesenchymal Stem Cells.

2018

Inorganic polyphosphate [polyP] has proven to be a promising physiological biopolymer for potential use in regenerative medicine because of its morphogenetic activity and function as an extracellular energy-donating system. Amorphous Ca2+ -polyP nanoparticles [Ca-polyP-NPs] are characterized by a high zeta potential with -34 mV (at pH 7.4). This should contribute to the stability of suspensions of the spherical nanoparticles (radius 94 nm), but make them less biocompatible. The zeta potential decreases to near zero after exposure of the Ca-polyP-NPs to protein/peptide-containing serum or medium plus serum. Electron microscopy analysis reveals that the particles rapidly change into a coacerv…

2019

During lytic herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) infection, the expansion of the viral replication compartments leads to an enrichment of the host chromatin in the peripheral nucleoplasm. We have shown previously that HSV-1 infection induces the formation of channels through the compacted peripheral chromatin. Here, we used three-dimensional confocal and expansion microscopy, soft X-ray tomography, electron microscopy, and random walk simulations to analyze the kinetics of host chromatin redistribution and capsid localization relative to their egress site at the nuclear envelope. Our data demonstrated a gradual increase in chromatin marginalization, and the kinetics of chromatin smoothening arou…