The research of PhD students Mahesh Devarasetty and Kyle Cowdrick, and Drs. Aleksander Skardal, Frank Marini and Shay Soker is featured on the front cover of Tissue Engineering Part A for October 2017. The cover art shows a 3D reconstruction of collagen fiber properties in submucosal organoids with embedded HCT-116 spheroids with Col I fibers (blue), imaged using second-harmonic generation. Cellular autofluorescence (red) indicates cell bodies. The paper, titled “ Bioengineered Submucosal Organoids for In Vitro Modeling of Colorectal Cancer,” is also published in the journal.
Drs. Zhan Wang, Tracy Criswell, James Yoo, Yu Zhou and Anthony Atala along with Primary Investigator, Dr. Yuanyuan Zhang, have their work on tissue-specific cell expansion for potential application in cell therapy featured on the Tissue Engineering Part B cover for October 2017. The cover art shows a number of human muscle progenitor cells and thickness of myotube with multinuclei significantly increased on liver-extracellular matrix combined with a hyaluronic acid-based hydrogel decorated with heparin (liver-ECM-HA-HP gel) on day 3. The Triple Immunofluorescence Staining represents Myf-5 maker (red) for skeleton muscle cells, phalloidin (green) for myotube and DAPI (blue) for nuclei. For further details, see the paper, “ Tissue-Specific Extracellular Matrix Enhances Skeletal Muscle Precursor Cell Expansion and Differentiation for Potential Application in Cell Therapy.”