Biology subjects

Heller, L.

Publications and source records attributed to Heller, L..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Skin-conformal electronics for wearable electrogastrography monitoring

Electrogastrography (EGG), a non-invasive method for measuring gastric myoelectrical activity, offers valuable insights into gastrointestinal motility and functional disorders such as gastroparesis and functional dyspepsia. Despite its diagnostic potential, the clinical adoption of EGG has been limited due to its reliance on rigid electrodes and bulky instrumentation, which leads to motion artifacts and poor signal quality, and ultimately reduces patient comfort and restricting data collection to short-duration, stationary settings. To address these limitations, we present FlexEGG, a skin-conformal, flexible electronic system engineered for high-fidelity EGG monitoring in both clinical and real-world environments. The device incorporates a soft, stretchable electrode array specifically designed for the abdominal surface, utilizing a hybrid stretchable conductor composed of conductive polymer, silver nanowires (AgNWs), and polyurethane elastomer, which leads to good skin contact, signal stability, and mechanical conformability. A custom low-noise analog front-end and digital signal processing pipeline enables reliable acquisition of low-frequency, low-amplitude gastric slow waves. Additionally, FlexEGG supports simultaneous electrocardiogram (ECG) measurement, potentially facilitating integrated gut-heart axis monitoring for broader physiological assessment. In this study, we describe the design, implementation, and validation of FlexEGG in multi-channel, long-duration EGG and ECG recordings. Our findings demonstrate its potential as a wearable, non-invasive tool for continuous gastrointestinal electrophysiology monitoring, enabling new opportunities for diagnosing and managing digestive disorders in everyday settings.

bioengineering↗

bioRxiv2025

Mycoelectronics: Bioprinted Living Fungal Bioelectronics for Artificial Sensation

The intelligence of the human biological system is enabled by the highly distributed sensing receptors on soft skin that can distinguish various stimulations or environmental cues, thus establishing the fundamental logic of sensing and physiological regulation or response. To replicate biological perception, two approaches have emerged: artificial nervous systems that utilize soft electronics as biomimetic receptors to convert external stimuli into frequency-encoded signals, and biohybrid solutions that integrate living cells, plants, or even live animals with electronic components to decode environmental cues for life-like sensations. However, most current biohybrid approaches for artificial sensation are based on eukaryotic cells, which suffer from slow growth, stringent culture conditions, environmental susceptibility, and short lifespans, thus limiting their integration into practical wearables or robotic sensory skins. Here, we introduce fungi-based printable "Mycoelectronics", which are created by additive bioprinting of living fungal mycelium networks onto stretchable electronics, as a practical living thermo-responsive sensory platform. This Mycoelectronics approach leverages fungis capacity for rapid biological responsiveness, cultivability with exponential growth, stability and self-healing in ambient conditions, bioprintability for scalable manufacturing, and mechanical flexibility for seamless integration with soft electronics. Critically, we discovered that the thermal responsiveness of the fungal network arises from intrinsic cellular processes--specifically, heat-induced vacuole remodeling and fusion, which modulate ionic transport and thus the electrical conductivity of the mycelial cells and networks, enabling a rapid temperature response. By bridging the gap between cell biology and soft electronics, the Mycoelectronics device with a living mycelium network functions as a thermal sensation system with rapid response and intrinsic self-healing properties, autonomously restoring sensing capabilities after damage or autonomously establishing sensor pathways in hard-to-reach locations. Furthermore, by integrating fungal thermal sensing with electronic circuits, we established a hybrid bioelectronic reflex arc that can actuate muscles and initiate diverse actions, suggesting promising applications in future neurorobotics and neuroprosthetics.

bioengineering↗

bioRxiv2025

Target the Heart: a new axis of Alzheimer's disease prevention

Cyclosporine A and other calcineurin inhibitors have been identified as prospective treatments for preventing Alzheimers disease. Utilizing a neural network model, Z-LaP Tracker, we previously found that calcineurin inhibitors elicit a unique behavioral profile in zebrafish larvae characterized by increased activity, acoustic hyperexcitability, and reduced visually guided behaviors. Screening a large library of FDA-approved drugs using Z-LaP Tracker revealed a cluster of 65 drugs demonstrating a cyclosporine A-like behavioral profile. 14 of these drugs were heart medications, including angiotensin receptor blockers, beta-blockers, alpha-adrenergic receptor antagonists, and a statin. This suggests some heart medications may be effective in preventing or ameliorating Alzheimers disease pathology. Other studies have shown that many of these 14 drugs directly or indirectly inhibit the calcineurin-NFAT pathway, alike cyclosporine A. Dual administration of the heart medications with cyclosporine A in Z-LaP Tracker revealed synergistic effects: lower doses of each heart medication could be delivered in conjunction with a lower dose of cyclosporine A to evoke a similar or larger behavioral effect than higher doses of each drug independently. This indicates that co-administering a low dose of cyclosporine A with select cardiac drugs could be a potentially effective treatment strategy for Alzheimers disease and cardiovascular dysfunction, while mitigating side effects associated with higher doses of cyclosporine A. Given that heart disease precedes Alzheimers disease in many patients, physicians may be able to create a treatment regimen that simultaneously addresses both conditions. Our results suggest that cyclosporine A combined with simvastatin, irbesartan, cilostazol, doxazosin, or nebivolol are the most promising candidates for future exploration.

animal behavior and cognition↗