Technology used by World War I aviation aces inspires discovery of new mobile operations

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst took inspiration from the synchronization of machine guns and propellers on World War I fighter planes to manipulate cell behavior by precisely adjusting the pH of the cell environment in real time. We have designed a new technology to As described in Nano Letters, their findings provide new avenues for creating drugs to treat cancer and heart disease, and expanding the field of tissue engineering.

“All cells respond to pH,” explains Jinglei Ping, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and corresponding author of the study. “Cell behavior and function are greatly influenced by pH. Some cells lose their viability at certain levels of pH, and some cells can have their physiological properties altered by pH. There is a sex.”

Previous studies have demonstrated that pH changes as small as 0.1 pH units can have physiologically significant effects on cells.

However, existing methods for changing the cellular environment are time-consuming and depend on diffusion, making it difficult to study the direct effects of pH changes. “We don’t know how specific cells respond to changes in pH in real time,” Ping says.

It is well established that pH can be manipulated with microelectrodes and is a good starting point for design, but doing this while also measuring changes in pH poses new hurdles. The graphene transistor that measures pH is also sensitive to the electric current from the. pH adjustment microelectrode. “So the current we measure is not pH-specific,” Ping says.

Here, Ping drew inspiration from the synchronization of fighter jet machine guns and propellers. On fighter jets, the machine gun is located behind the propeller. The aircraft must fire a bullet without hitting its own propeller. The solution is to synchronize the machine gun with the propeller so that the slower main gun fires only when aligned with the opening between the slow-moving propeller blades.

Ping’s team created a similar gap by temporarily turning off an electric current that changes pH. This millisecond-long gap is large enough for the transistor to accurately record pH without interference from the current from the microelectrode, but small enough that the pH does not have time to return to normal.

Their device was able to manipulate pH with a resolution of 0.1 pH units, far exceeding previous electrode-based attempts that only reached 0.6 pH units.

They tested the device on bacteria and heart cells. They found that as the environment became more basic, the movement of the bacteria (Bacillus subtilis) decreased. Compared to the traditional method, the new method was more efficient. One sample was required and nine data points were acquired in about nine minutes, whereas traditional methods would have taken two hours to collect 13 data points, each requiring its own sample.

They also found that when the pH of the environment decreased from neutral (7) to acidic (about 4), the heart rate of heart muscle cells doubled. This highlights the potential of this device to advance scientific understanding of the relationship with metabolic acidosis (when the body has excess). In addition to addressing important questions in heart disease treatment, it also addresses conditions such as acidity) and tachycardia (a condition in which the heart beats too fast).

“It opens doors, solves technical problems, and raises a lot of what-if questions for scientists,” Ping said. “I’m not saying we’ve addressed these long-term questions, but we are providing the tools to address them.”

Ping envisions this technology having applications in bioelectronics, tissue engineering, oncology treatment, and regenerative medicine.