Technology Resources Initiative Paper of the Month

SMART: An Open-Source Extension of WholeBrain for Intact Mouse Brain Registration and Segmentation. eNeuro.

Jin et al. presents an optimized protocol for Fos staining, a marker of neuronal activation, in a cleared mouse brain and provide an open-source R package called SMART (Semi-Manual Alignment to Reference Templates) as an extension to the Wholebrain pipeline (PMID: 29203898). SMART is designed to make whole-brain activity mapping more accessible to researchers looking to implement the technique and analysis into their research program. [Read More]

An integrated wearable microneedle array for the continuous monitoring of multiple biomarkers in interstitial fluid. Nature Biomedical Engineering.

Tehrani et al, describes the development and implementation of a wearable sensor that contains an array of microneedles for real-time monitoring of lactate and glucose or alcohol and glucose from interstitial fluid. This paper highlights the potential for garnering clinical data from individuals with alcohol abuse disorder, liver disease, and metabolic diseases. [Read More]

Verification of technical characteristics and performance of VeinViewer Flex, ICEN IN-G090-2 and AccuVein AV400 transillumination devices. Clinica Chimica Acta.

The authors describe a transillumination device that uses near infrared light-emitting diodes to visualize superficial veins and project a real-time image of the veins directly on the surface of the skin. This emerging technology has potential applications both clinically and pre-clinically to improve successful venipuncture for blood sampling and injection of therapeutics in challenging patient populations. [Read More]

Enhancer viruses for combinatorial cell-subclass-specific labeling. Neuron.

Two studies published last year harnessed single-cell chromatin accessibility to define and test cell-type-distinguishing enhancers for generating AAVs to express transgenes in discrete cell populations, and to study expression correspondence between species. These approaches provide researchers with one avenue to access specific cell types in the brain for targeted population studies and gene therapies. [Read More]

A chromatin integration labelling method enables epigenomic profiling with lower input. Nature Cell Biology.

Here in the article, authors introduce chromatin integration labelling (ChIL), a technique that combines immunostaining, transposase tagging and linear amplification for low-input epigenome/protein-binding profiling even from single cells. Using ChIL followed by sequencing (ChIL–seq), authors reliably detected the distributions of histone modifications and DNA-binding factors in 100–1,000 cells. [Read More]

Closed-loop wearable naloxone injector system. Scientific Reports.

Chan et al. (2021) have developed a wearable device to detect and reverse an opioid overdose by automatically injecting naloxone to a person who has stopped breathing and moving. This proof-of-principal technology has wide-ranging clinical and commercial potential, including helping to reduce the number of fatal opioid overdoses that could have been prevented if naloxone was available. [Read More]