April 2016 - This Month in JoVE: Cell Migration, Bacterial Motility, Psycholinguistics, and In Vitro Eye Model for Contact Lenses

Protocol

Analyzing In Vivo Cell Migration using Cell Transplantations and Time-lapse Imaging in Zebrafish Embryos

Florence A Giger¹, Julien G Dumortier², Nicolas B David¹

¹CNRS UMR8197 – INSERM U1024, IBENS, Institut de Biologie de l'École Normale Supérieure, ²Department of Physiology Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge

Combining cell transplantation, cytoskeletal labeling and loss/gain of function approaches, this protocol describes how the migrating zebrafish prospective prechordal plate can be used to analyze the function of a candidate gene in in vivo cell migration.

Comparing the Frequency Effect Between the Lexical Decision and Naming Tasks in Chinese

Xin-Yu Gao*¹, Meng-Feng Li*¹, Tai-Li Chou*², Jei-Tun Wu¹

¹Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, ²Neurobiology and Cognitive Science Center, National Taiwan University

Researchers adopt both the lexical decision task and the naming task to investigate some important topics such as character/word recognition by comparing the frequency effect between these two tasks. This article introduces this approach through two exemplar experiments and elaborates on the underlying logic.

Development of an In Vitro Ocular Platform to Test Contact Lenses

Chau-Minh Phan¹, Hendrik Walther¹, Huayi Gao², Jordan Rossy¹, Lakshman N. Subbaraman¹, Lyndon Jones¹

¹School of Optometry and Vision Science, University of Waterloo, ²Medella Health

Current in vitro models for evaluating contact lenses (CLs) and other eye-related applications are severely limited. The presented ocular platform simulates physiological tear flow, tear volume, air exposure and mechanical wear. This system is highly versatile and can be applied to various in vitro analyses with CLs.

Visualization of Twitching Motility and Characterization of the Role of the PilG in Xylella fastidiosa

Xiangyang Shi¹, Hong Lin²

¹Department of Plant Science, University of California, Davis, ²Agricultural Research Service, San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Sciences Center, United States Department of Agriculture

In this study, a nano-microfluidic flow chamber was employed to visualize and functionally characterize the twitching motility of Xylella fastidiosa, a bacterium that causes Pierce's disease in grapevine.