Analysis of mitochondrial regulation, studying flies for aging, or feeding rats… it's time to find out what JoVE articles to watch this week!
The first JoVE article to catch my imagination this week comes from our Bioengineering section. In this article, John’s Hopkins University’s Institute for Computational Medicine and Department for Biomedical Engineering collaborate to develop a patient specific heart imaging system. To achieve this goal, the shape and cellular orientation of a healthy heart are derived by Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and diffusion tensor MRI to develop a reference point for physicians, known as an atlas. Clinically, a patient’s heart can be derived from semi-automatic segmentation to create a computer generated model. The atlas, which contains a heart fiber map, is then computationally transformed into the patient’s heart, which provides an accurate model of heart function that can be used to analyze arrhythmia or to guide surgical procedures.
Everyone has to eat, right? The Division of Applied Medicine at University of Aberdeen is studying how immune cells eat fungal pathogens in this video published in JoVE's Immunology and Infection section. By breaking down phagocytosis, the process where one cell eats another, into four distinct steps these scientists can understand how a cell specifically targets and breaks down a pathogen. By observing the process dynamically using video, the entire immune process is recorded and can be analyzed. Cells are fluorescently stained so that they can be easily identified under a microscope. For this procedure, Candida albicans was used and cultured as the pathogen for mouse macrophages to attack.