The paradox of the life sciences: How to address climate change in the lab: How to address climate change in the lab.

Addressing climate change and sustainability starts with individuals and moves up to institutional change. Here is what we as scientists in the life sciences can do to enact change.

Integration of solid-state nanopores into a functional device designed for electrical and optical cross-monitoring.

We present a new strategy for fabricating a silicon nanopore device allowing straightforward fluidic integration and electrical as well as optical monitoring. The device presents nanopores of diameters 10 nm to 160 nm, and could therefore be used to obtain solvent-free free-standing lipid bilayers from small unilamellar vesicles (SUV) or large unilamellar vesicles (LUV). The silicon chip fabrication process only requires front side processing of a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrate. A polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic interface is assembled on the silicon chip for fluidic handling and electrical addressing. We detail the electrical specifications of our device and some perspectives showing that the use of an SOI substrate is a convenient way to reduce the electrical noise in a silicon nanopore device without the need of a photolitographic patterned passivation layer. We then demonstrate simultaneous electrical and optical monitoring by capturing negatively charged fluorescent nanoparticles. Finally, in the perspective of solvent-free free-standing lipid bilayers, we show that incubation of SUV results in a drastic increase of the device electrical resistance, which is likely due to the formation of a free-standing lipid bilayer sealing the nanopores. Graphical abstract ᅟ.

Mechanical control of morphogenesis by Fat/Dachsous/Four-jointed planar cell polarity pathway.

During animal development, several planar cell polarity (PCP) pathways control tissue shape by coordinating collective cell behavior. Here, we characterize by means of multiscale imaging epithelium morphogenesis in the Drosophila dorsal thorax and show how the Fat/Dachsous/Four-jointed PCP pathway controls morphogenesis. We found that the proto-cadherin Dachsous is polarized within a domain of its tissue-wide expression gradient. Furthermore, Dachsous polarizes the myosin Dachs, which in turn promotes anisotropy of junction tension. By combining physical modeling with quantitative image analyses, we determined that this tension anisotropy defines the pattern of local tissue contraction that contributes to shaping the epithelium mainly via oriented cell rearrangements. Our results establish how tissue planar polarization coordinates the local changes of cell mechanical properties to control tissue morphogenesis.