A gut's complex architecture, recreated on a microscope slide–sized chip
Gut instinct, gut feeling or gutting it out—what exactly is the human gut? It's the workhorse of the digestive system and home to a vast, dynamic community of microorganisms that influence human health. In fact, the human body contains roughly equal numbers of nonhuman (microbial) and human cells.
The human gut is a complex system, home to trillions of microorganisms that play a crucial role in human health. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have developed a 3D-printed gut-on-a-chip microfluidic device that recreates this intricate architecture and activity on a fluidic chip the size of a microscope slide.
This innovative device could revolutionize the study of human-microbe interactions and open up new possibilities for drug discovery, disease modeling, and reducing the need for animal testing. The chip's unique design features a removable gasket that houses the human tissue, allowing for separate tissue culture, chemical communication, and repeated temporal sampling during experiments.
This approach enables researchers to cultivate cells off-chip, in a simple culture system, rather than in extensive laboratory equipment, and provides the ability to conduct frequent and extensive temporal sampling during an experiment. By generating and curating datasets, the researchers can also develop machine learning models to predict microbiome health and perform predictions.
This development could potentially lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the gut's intricate events and enable researchers to test various scenarios in real-time.
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