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O'Connor, Blakely

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O'Connor

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Blakely

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O'Connor, Blakely
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    Traction force microscopy of engineered cardiac tissues
    (Public Library of Science, 2018) Pasqualini, Francesco; Agarwal, Ashutosh; O'Connor, Blakely; Liu, Qihan; Sheehy, Sean P.; Parker, Kevin
    Cardiac tissue development and pathology have been shown to depend sensitively on microenvironmental mechanical factors, such as extracellular matrix stiffness, in both in vivo and in vitro systems. We present a novel quantitative approach to assess cardiac structure and function by extending the classical traction force microscopy technique to tissue-level preparations. Using this system, we investigated the relationship between contractile proficiency and metabolism in neonate rat ventricular myocytes (NRVM) cultured on gels with stiffness mimicking soft immature (1 kPa), normal healthy (13 kPa), and stiff diseased (90 kPa) cardiac microenvironments. We found that tissues engineered on the softest gels generated the least amount of stress and had the smallest work output. Conversely, cardiomyocytes in tissues engineered on healthy- and disease-mimicking gels generated significantly higher stresses, with the maximal contractile work measured in NRVM engineered on gels of normal stiffness. Interestingly, although tissues on soft gels exhibited poor stress generation and work production, their basal metabolic respiration rate was significantly more elevated than in other groups, suggesting a highly ineffective coupling between energy production and contractile work output. Our novel platform can thus be utilized to quantitatively assess the mechanotransduction pathways that initiate tissue-level structural and functional remodeling in response to substrate stiffness.
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    Robotic fluidic coupling and interrogation of multiple vascularized organ chips
    (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2020-01-27) Novak, Richard; Ingram, Miles; Marquez, Susan; Das, Debarun; Delahanty, Aaron; Herland, Anna; Maoz, Ben; Jeanty, Sauveur; Somayaji, Mahadevabharath R.; Burt, Morgan; Calamari, Elizabeth; Chalkiadaki, Angeliki; Cho, Alexander; Choe, Youngjae; Chou, David; Cronce, Michael; Dauth, Stephanie; Divic, Toni; Fernandez-Alcon, Jose; Ferrante, Thomas; Ferrier, John; FitzGerald, Edward; Fleming, Rachel; Jalili Firoozinezhad, Sasan; Grevesse, Thomas; Goss, Josue; Hamkins-Indik, Tiama; Henry, Olivier; Hinojosa, Chris; Huffstater, Tessa; Jang, Kyung-Jin; Kujala, Ville; Leng, Lian; Mannix, Robert; Milton, Yuka; Nawroth, Janna; Nestor, Bret; Ng Pitti, Carlos; O'Connor, Blakely; Park, Tae-Eun; Sanchez, Henry; Sliz, Josiah; Sontheimer-Phelps, Alexandra; Swenor, Ben; Thompson, Guy; Touloumes, George J.; Tranchemontagne, Zachary; Wen, Norman; Yedid, Moran; Bahinski, Anthony; Hamilton, Geraldine; Levner, Daniel; Levy, Oren; Przekwas, Andrzej; Prantil-Baun, Rachelle; Parker, Kevin; Ingber, Donald
    Organ chips can recapitulate organ-level (patho)physiology, yet pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic analyses require multi-organ systems linked by vascular perfusion. Here, we describe an ‘Interrogator’ employing liquid-handling robotics, custom software and an integrated mobile microscope for the automated culture, perfusion, medium addition, fluidic linking, sample collection and in situ microscopic imaging of up to 10 Organ Chips inside a standard tissue-culture incubator. The robotic interrogator maintained the viability and organ-specific functions of eight vascularized, two-channel organ chips (intestine, liver, kidney, heart, lung, skin, blood–brain barrier and brain) for 3 weeks in culture when intermittently fluidically coupled via a common blood substitute through their medium reservoirs and endothelium-lined vascular channels. We used the robotic interrogator and a physiological multi-compartmental reduced-order model of the experimental system to quantitatively predict the distribution of an inulin tracer perfused through the multi-organ Human-Body-on-Chips. The automated culture system allows for the imaging of cells in the organ chips, and for repeated sampling of both the vascular and interstitial compartments without compromising fluidic coupling.