Three dimensional multicellular aggregate, also referred to as cell spheroid or microtissue, is an indispensable tool for in vitro evaluating antitumor activity and drug efficacy. Compared with classical cellular monolayer, multicellular tumor spheroid (MCTS) offers a more rational platform to predict in vivo drug efficacy and toxicity. Nevertheless, traditional processing methods such as plastic dish culture with nonadhesive surfaces are regularly time-consuming, laborious and difficult to provide uniform-sized spheroids, thus causing poor reproducibility of experimental data and impeding high-throughput drug screening. In order to provide a robust and effective platform for in vitro drug evaluation, we present an agarose scaffold prepared with the template containing uniform-sized micro-wells in commercially available cell culture plates. The agarose scaffold allows for good adjustment of MCTS size and large-scale production of MCTS. Transparent agarose scaffold also allows for monitoring of spheroid formation under an optical microscopy. The formation of MCTS from MCF-7 cells was prepared using different-size-well templates and systematically investigated in terms of spheroid growth curve, circularity, and cell viability. The doxorubicin cytotoxicity against MCF-7 spheroid and MCF-7 monolayer cells was compared. The drug penetration behavior, cell cycle distribution, cell apoptosis, and gene expression were also evaluated in MCF-7 spheroid. The findings of this study indicate that, compared with cellular monolayer, MCTS provides a valuable platform for the assessment of therapeutic candidates in an in vivo-mimic microenvironment, and thus has great potential for use in drug discovery and tumor biology research.

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A family of hydrophobic borohydride-rich ionic liquids was developed, which exhibited the shortest ignition delay times of 1.7 milliseconds and the lowest viscosity (10 mPa s) of hypergolic ionic fluids, demonstrating their great potential as faster-igniting rocket fuels to replace toxic hydrazine derivatives in liquid bipropellant formulations.

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[Ru(phen)(2)(dppz)](2+)can serve as a prominent molecular "light switch" for G-quadruplexes and i-motif, but it preferentially binds to G-quadruplexes over i-motif.

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Analog, unclocked, spiking neuromorphic microchips open new perspectives for implantable or wearable biosensors and biocontrollers, due to their low energy consumption and heat dissipation. However, the challenges from a computational point of view are formidable. Here we outline our solutions to realize the reservoir computing paradigm on such hardware and address the combined problems of low bit resolution, device mismatch, approximate neuron models, and timescale mismatch. The main contribution is a computational scheme, called Reservoir Transfer, which enables us to transfer the dynamical properties of a well-performing neural network which has been optimized on a digital computer, onto neuromorphic hardware that displays the abovementioned problematic properties. Here we present a case study of implementing an ECG heartbeat abnormality detector to showcase the proposed method.

A series of zwitterionic energetic materials was reported, which exhibited higher densities and better detonation performances than common energetic salts.