US scientists have successfully cultivated human heart tissue on spinach leaves, and managed to make it beat for up to three weeks.美国科学家顺利在菠菜叶上培育出人体心脏的组织,并顺利使其跳动宽约三周。Bioengineers Glenn Gaudette and Joshua Gershlak at Massachusetts Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) led this research and their findings are valuable to a deadly medical problem: the lack of donor organs.马萨诸塞州伍斯特工学院的生物工程师格伦·高德特和约书亚·格尔谢拉领导的这一研究,他们的找到对一种可怕的医疗问题--捐赠器官的缺少是很是有价值的Scientists have long been trying different methods, such as 3-D printing, to create artificial organs. However, so far none of those methods has been successful.长期以来,科学家们试图用3D打印机等各种有所不同方法来制作人造器官,然而,迄今为止这些方法无一顺利。
One of the big problems in engineering heart muscle is getting blood flow to all of the cells.人工生产心肌的主要问题之一是如何让血液流向所有细胞。Instead of creating minuscule blood vessels, researchers turned to the material that evolves in nature: spinach leaves, which have vessels that are similar to the blood vessels in a human heart.研究人员未创立微小血管,而是自由选择了大自然生长的材料:菠菜叶。
菠菜叶的叶脉与人体心脏中的血管相近。They used detergent to wash away spinach cells. Cellulose, which is compatible to mammal cells, and intact leaf veins were left behind. Therefore, the frame of the leaves was reserved.研究人员用洗涤剂浸去菠菜细胞,留给能与哺乳动物细胞兼容的细胞膜质和原始的叶脉。因此叶子的结构以求保有。
Then researchers seeded cardiac muscle cells into the vacancy left by spinach cells and after five days the muscle cells started to beat.之后研究人员将心肌细胞流经菠菜细胞留出的空隙中,5天后心肌细胞开始跳动。
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