Tech news: stem cells for modeling and curing disease.

Freya Leask explores developments in cell culture and stem cell research that are revolutionizing how diseases are studied and treated.

Explicit and implicit attitude toward an emerging food technology: The case of cultured meat.

Cultured meat is an unfamiliar emerging food technology that could provide a near endless supply of high quality protein with a relatively small ecological footprint. To understand consumer acceptance of cultured meat, this study investigated the influence of information provision on the explicit and implicit attitude toward cultured meat. Three experiments were conducted using a Solomon four-group design to rule out pretest sensitization effects. The first experiment (N = 190) showed that positive or negative information about cultured meat changed the explicit attitude in the direction of the information. This effect was smaller for participants who were more familiar with cultured meat. In the second experiment (N = 194) positive information was provided about solar panels, an attitude object belonging to the same sustainable product category as sustainable food products such as cultured meat. Positive information about solar panels was found to change the explicit attitude in the direction of the information. Using mood induction, the third experiment (N = 192) ruled out the alternative explanation that explicit attitude change in experiment 1 and 2 was caused by content free affect rather than category based inferences. The implicit attitude appeared insensitive to both information or mood state in all three experiments. These findings show that the explicit attitude toward cultured meat can be influenced by information about the sustainability of cultured meat and information about a positively perceived sustainable product. This effect was shown to be content based rather than merely affect based. Content based information in a relevant context could therefore contribute to the commercial success of cultured meat.

A cost-effective method for preparing, maintaining, and transfecting neurons in organotypic slices.

The cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie brain function are challenging to study in the living brain. The development of organotypic slices has provided a welcomed addition to our arsenal of experimental brain preparations by allowing both genetic and prolonged pharmacological manipulations in a system that, much like the acute slice preparation, retains several core features of the cellular and network architecture found in situ. Neurons in organotypic slices can survive in culture for several weeks, can be molecularly manipulated by transfection procedures and their function can be interrogated by traditional cellular electrophysiological or imaging techniques. Here, we describe a cost-effective protocol for the preparation and maintenance of organotypic slices and also describe a protocol for biolistic transfection that can be used to introduce plasmids in a small subset of neurons living in an otherwise molecularly unperturbed network. The implementation of these techniques offers a flexible experimental paradigm that can be used to study a multitude of neuronal mechanisms.

A low-cost method for brain slice cultures.

Low-cost, simple procedures for organotypic tissue cultures are desirable for high-throughput biological experiments such as large-scale medical/drug screening. We present a practical and economical method to cultivate brain slices using hydrophilic filtration membranes. With a cost reduction of more than 90%, this technique allows us to prepare hippocampal slice cultures that are morphologically and functionally indistinguishable from those obtained by the widely used Millicell-CM method.

[Meeting the demand for quality and safety checked corneal transplants. The role of corneal banks and health care organizations in Germany]. / Bedarfsdeckung mit qualitätsgesicherten Hornhauttransplantaten. Rolle der Hornhautbanken und der Kostenträger in Deutschland.

Only cornea banks with organ culture techniques provide the substantial length of time often required by safety and quality controls of corneal transplants. In Germany the annual need would be 4,500 transplants per year, for which 7,500 donor corneas must be primarily taken into culture. Meeting total demand should theoretically be easy as only 3,800 corneal donors are needed from a total of 860,000 deceased per year. Since consent is given in up to 50% if approached properly, shortage in donor corneas should not pose a problem. However, shortage still is the major problem because most cornea banks are still in the initial phase. This is because of the lack of direct refinancing by health care organizations. These organizations must be required to meet their legal responsibilities in this area.

[Costs of preserved corneal transplants]. / Kosten gelagerter Hornhauttransplantate.

BACKGROUND: Organ culture medium and Optisol are the most commonly used corneal storage mediums. This study compares the costs for these two methods. METHODS: In the calculation of costs we did not just take the direct costs into account, but also tried to determine the fixed costs per transplanted cornea with corresponding assumptions. RESULTS: Proceeding on the assumption that 50 stored corneas were transplanted per year, an amount of 11,660 ATS (1,666 DM, 857 ECU) for each organ cultured and 11,986 ATS (1,712 DM, 881 ECU) for each graft preserved in Optisol was calculated. Raising the number of transplanted corneas to 400 per year, each tissue stored in organ culture medium costs 2,811 ATS (402 DM, 207 ECU) and those preserved in Optisol 3234 ATS (462 DM, 238 ECU). CONCLUSION: Since organ culture storage gives us a reduction in costs of more than 15% compared to storing in Optisol, when preserving 400 transplantable grafts, from the business economics aspect, this storage method should be preferred.