UMASS Chan Medical School

3 ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN JoVE

Developmental Biology

Identification and Isolation of Burst-Forming Unit and Colony-Forming Unit Erythroid Progenitors from Mouse Tissue by Flow Cytometry

Aishwarya Swaminathan¹, Yung Hwang¹, Ashley Winward¹, Merav Socolovsky¹

¹Department of Molecular, Cell and Cancer Biology, UMASS Chan Medical School

Here, we describe a novel flow cytometric method for prospective isolation of early burst-forming unit erythroid (BFU-e) and colony-forming unit erythroid (CFU-e) progenitors directly from fresh mouse bone marrow and spleen. This protocol, developed based on single-cell transcriptomic data, is the first to isolate all the tissue's erythroid progenitors with high purity.

Bioengineering

In Vitro Cleavage Assays using Purified Recombinant Drosophila Caspases for Substrate Screening

Prathibha Yarikipati¹, Andreas Bergmann¹

¹Department of Molecular, Cell and Cancer Biology, UMass Chan Medical School

Here we present a protocol to express and purify recombinant Drosophila caspases Dronc and Drice, and their use in in vitro cleavage assays.

Neuroscience

Automated Multimodal Stimulation and Simultaneous Neuronal Recording from Multiple Small Organisms

Hamilton White^1,2, Vanessa Kamara¹, Veronika Gorski¹, Molly Busby¹, Dirk R. Albrecht^1,3

¹Department of Biomedical Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, ²Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, UMass Chan Medical School, ³Department of Biology and Biotechnology, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

We present a method for the flexible chemical and multimodal stimulation and recording of simultaneous neural activity from many Caenorhabditis elegans worms. This method uses microfluidics, open-source hardware and software, and supervised automated data analysis to enable the measurement of neuronal phenomena such as adaptation, temporal inhibition, and stimulus crosstalk.