Ji-Yen Cheng

Microfluidic systems commenced a new era of coral research, reducing demands for experimental material and minimizing scientific impacts on natural environments. Reduced size also allows continuous microscopy during experiments at unprecedented spatial–temporal resolutions and ensures greater homogeneity of environmental factors among samples. Since the report of the coral‐on‐a‐chip platform in 2016 by Shapiro and colleagues, modifications of coral microfluidic chips have been reported for various experimental purposes. However, existing coral cultivation chips were mostly designed for isolated polyps and for specific experimental setups, limiting their flexibility. Moreover, maintenance of coral health in miniaturized environments has proven challenging, preventing applications of coral chips to experiments with long timescales, which are more relevant to natural environmental events. Here, we present two new coral chips that enable long‐term (over a month), stable coral cultivation in the laboratory without laborious maintenance. Through experiments involving several research topics that are of paramount importance, for example flow speed, heating, osmolarity fluctuation and pathogen inoculation, we tested the applicability of our miniaturized system to coral research. Our results demonstrate the usefulness of our miniaturized system with different experimental objectives. Furthermore, by employing coral microcolonies, that is small coral fragments, our system is suitable for a wider spectrum of corals and is compatible with various analyses, compared to polyp‐based microfluidic systems in previous studies. The miniaturized system presented here considerably extends the applicability of existing coral cultivation chips and provides a convenient, cost‐effective and environmentally friendly platform for future coral studies.

In vitro human alveolar models provide a platform to investigate the cellular behavior and activity of human lung cells for toxicity assays. However, there has been relatively rare research on the new human alveolar epithelial cell line (hAELVi) for the toxicity induced by heavy metal ions. In this study, hAELVi cells were exposed to various concentrations of Cd, As_, and Zn for 24h. The morphological changes of hAELVi cells were observed after exposure to heavy metals. A high concentration of Cd, As, and Zn led to cell death. However, the cytotoxicity was not reflected by the transepithelial electrical resistance (TEER) value after exposure to 250 μM of As and Zn. In addition, Cd at a concentration of 200 μM induced the significant production of TNF-α whereas As and Zn did not induce observable secretion of the cytokine. On the contrary, a high concentration of Cd, As, and Zn inhibited the production of IL-6. In addition, there is not a direct relationship between the metal ion cytotoxicity and the ROS production in the hAELVi cells. Accordingly, this study contributes to elucidating the cytotoxicity, TEER variation, ROS production, and cytokine secretion of hAELVi cells to acute exposure to heavy metal in vitro. The discrepancy between the cytotoxicity and the TEER result suggests that hAELVi cell cultured on permeable membrane exhibit very different behavior, which is worth pursuing.

A nanoplasmonic platform for oligonucleotide detection is developed. Functionalized unmodified PEG-Au was used as an SPR signal amplifier. The SPR sensor exhibited high sensitivity with a detection limit of 100 aM. The platform was able to detect a single mismatch sequence.