Vincent Studer

Biography

 Techniques to overcome this limitation in the manufacture of microfluidic devices. Microfluidics provide an alternative approach to the chemical environment at the micron scale, and it has been fruitfully employed in chemotactic assays with non-neuronal eukaryotic cells. However, applications of microfluidics to neuron guidance have been limited. This can be attributed to the sensitivity of neuronal cells to culture and fluidic conditions in microcircuits. In the last few years They have developed a range of microfluidic systems, which overcome this limitation. They have applied to the study of neuronal chemotaxis in a quantitative manner. Neuron guidance is triggered by extracellular signals called "guidance cues", which determines the direction of axon growth to reach the appropriate target. They first probed the directional nerve growth of cones (the motile tip of axons) in controlled chemical landscapes. Nerve growth cones are chemical sensors that convert graded extracellular cues into oriented axonal motion. They also used microfluidic devices to test the combinatorial effect of multiple guidance cues on axon guidance. It has been recently demonstrated that the combination of two guidance cues, can generate an attractant activity that none of these guidance factors has alone. Using innovative shear-free microfluidic device, we have successfully reproduced and precise these results in vitro.

Research Interest

 Neurology