Microfluidic technology provides opportunities to create in vitro models with physiological microenvironment for cell study.Introducing the identified key aspects,including tissue-tissue interfaces,spatiotemporal chemical gradients,and dynamic mechanical forces,of living organs into the microfluidic system,"organs-on-chips"display an unprecedented application potential in a lot of biological fields such as fundamental physiological and pathophysiological research,drug efficacy and toxicity testing,and clinical diagnosis.Here,we review the recent development of organs-on-chips and briefly discuss their future challenges.
We have built an integrated imaging system by combining stimulated emission depletion(STED)microscope and atomic force microscope(AFM).The STED microscope was constructed based on the supercontinuum fiber laser and a super lateral resolution of42 nm was achieved.With this integrated imaging system,morphological features,mechanical parameters and fluorescence super resolution imaging were obtained simultaneously for both nanobeads and fixed cell samples.This new integrated imaging system is expected to obtain comprehensive information at the nanoscale for studies in nanobiology and nanomedicine.
