Greetings from Basel! Welcome to the first MxW Bulletinof 2019!
Spring is in the air and we are excited to share with you the latest in MaxWell Biosystems. Here are the contents:
We are very happy to announce the winners of the first MxW Cell Story Challenge. The winners were chosen based on their proposal on how they will apply the MaxOne HD-MEA System in their current cell preparation to answer their research questions. Here are the cell stories that Lill and Łukasz want to discover:
Lill Eva Johansen is currently studying inflammatory neuropathies using an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-based disease model. Her research goal is to be able to measure nerve conduction in human iPSC-derived motor neurons modeling multifocal motor neuropathy (MMN). She plans to use MaxOne to track action potential propagation in iPSC-derived motor neurons, both healthy and disease conditions, and find out if a serum from MMN patients can delay or block conduction in vitro.
Łukasz Bijoch is currently using electrophysiology experiments to define rules of memory in the amygdala and the hippocampus, in the context of different types of learning. He proposes a project of mapping the receptive fields of dendritic spikes of hippocampal neurons, creating engrams, by combining MaxOne and optogenetics. Both the auditory and visual cortices will be manipulated to respond to either blue or red light. The experiments will be performed using acute hippocampal slices.
Both Lill and Łukasz won a travel grant worth $2000 to attend SFN 2019 in Chigaco, USA.
Find out more about Lill's and Łukasz's Cell Story here.
MxW Travels
We attended three conferences in the beginning of 2019.
Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening 2019 Conference. With the aim to get to know the high-throughput screening market, Urs Frey and Marie Obien flew to Washington, DC to exhibit at SLAS (2-6 February). More than 5,000 life scientist researchers and technologists attended the conference.
Stem Cells & Organoids in Development & Disease, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. From February 20th to 22nd, Marie Obien, Lucia Garbini, and Giulio Zorzi discussed with about high-resolution electrophysiology readouts applied to functional characterization of neuronal and cardiac cells/tissues/organoids.
MaxWell Biosystems goes to China in 2019! We have established partnerships with regional Chinese distributors (Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou), who are dedicated to market and sell MxW products to research labs, pharmaceutical companies, and contract research organizations. Representatives from our distribution partners came to Basel for an intensive training in all aspects of the MxW sales and marketing.
Soon, we will have a roadshow in China. Stay tuned and let us know if you want to join our workshops! Contact marie.obien@mxwbio.com for more info.
Latest Publications using MxW Technology
Brain Slice M. E. J. Obien, et al., "Accurate signal-source localization in brain slices by means of high-density microelectrode arrays", Scientific Reports 2019, Vol. 9, Article 788 (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-36895-y). Online
Retina S. Idrees, et al., "Saccadic suppression by way of retinal-circuit image processing", bioRxiv 2019, (DOI: 10.1101/562595). Online
