Not sure! Here’s an older paper from Yamada group at UC Davis on self-fusion: www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

@manuelthery.bsky.social Oui! We sometimes see that in our bioelectric steering assays, but those self-contacts are transient and quickly result in membrane fusion. Watch the cell when it changes direction. This is electrotaxis —the cell is programmed to go ‘left’/‘right’/‘left’ (F-actin)

And self-adhesions are more than just pretty—they slow migration down and stabilize cells; exactly what you might want at the interface between skin and an implant, for example. This type of adhesion might also help future neural implants, or help fuse living/non-living materials in future machines!

It’s really stable too—we saw self-adhesions last at least 23 hrs in skin cells! This is important if we want to eventually use these to improve how percutaneous implants (dental screws, amputation hubs, drug catheters) adhere to skin over time to reduce infection and improve comfort.

But it only worked about 2/3 of the time. So we made smaller and pointier arches—about 3% the size of a human hair and got cells to adhere to themselves 93% of the time. Image shows cross-section of cell with tiny arch inside (green top; red hand-shakes; blue arch)!

Since cells can deform around things, we wondered if a cell could wrap around a support and *hold hands with itself*—just like hugging a small tree! Inspired by L’Arc de Triomphe, we 3D printed *nano* ‘arches’ smaller than cells to make a cell wrap around and stick to itself (pink)! It worked!

Cells can attach to the world in two ways—with their ‘feet’ (integrins; green) and with their ‘hands’ (cell-cell adhesion proteins like cadherins; red), and their cadherins are *really* strong. Cell adhesion is *key* for attaching strongly to implants; could we take advantage of ‘hands’ here?

It allows shaping the electric field, from single cells (first video) to sculpting whole tissues (movie below). This was several years of Yubin and Jeremy's lives; it's now changing what we know and do with electricity to control cell behaviors. It's so cool--please use it, we will help/share!

It really does work for all sorts of model systems and culture set-ups, even transwells. Transmitted light, epifluor, confocal are all good! Here it is driving an electric field perpendicular to small cell colonies cultured on a transwell and causing them to expand and contract.

SCHEPHERD ctrls electrotaxis--telling cells how to migrate in a DC E-field. It uses 3D printed inserts and custom-designed circuitry to do 8x indep. experiments all in a single platform + GUI; no other stim eq. needed! It's adorable and so much easier to use. Can be adapted for 6-24-well plates.

Please add me too, thanks!