Scientists have developed a technique that allows them to speed up or slow down human heart cells growing in a dish on command.<\/p>\n
Researchers from University of California San Diego School of Medicine in the US operate on the heart cells simply by shining a light on them and varying its intensity.<\/p>\n
The cells are grown on a material called graphene, which converts light into electricity, providing a more realistic environment than standard plastic or glass laboratory dishes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were surprised at the degree of flexibility, that graphene allows you to pace cells literally at will,\u201d said Alex Savchenko, a research scientist at UC San Diego School of Medicine.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou want them to beat twice as fast? No problem – you just increase the light intensity. Three times faster? No problem – increase the light or graphene density,\u201d Savchenko said.<\/p>\n
The method, described in the journal Science Advances, could be used for a number of research and clinical applications.<\/p>\n
They include testing therapeutic drugs in more biologically relevant systems, developing use-specific drugs that are more precise and have fewer systemic effects, and creating better medical devices, such as light-controlled pacemakers.<\/p>\n
The researchers generated heart cells from donated skin cells, via an intermediary cell type called an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC).<\/p>\n
Then they grew these iPSC-derived heart cells on a graphene surface.<\/p>\n
The researchers found a way to precisely control how much electricity the graphene generated by varying the intensity of the light to which they exposed it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Scientists have developed a technique that allows them to speed up or slow down human heart cells growing in a dish on command. Researchers from University of California San Diego School of Medicine in the US operate on the heart cells simply by shining a light on them and varying its intensity. The cells are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31641,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31642,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31640\/revisions\/31642"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}