Laser processed TiN reinforced Ti6Al4V composite coatings

The purpose of this first generation investigation is to evaluate fabrication, in vitro cytotoxicity, cell–material interactions and tribological performance of TiN particle reinforced Ti6Al4V composite coatings for potential wear resistant load bearing implant applications. The microstructural analysis of the composites was performed using scanning electron microscope and phase analysis was done with X-ray diffraction. In vitro cell–material interactions, using human fetal osteoblast cell line, have been assessed on these composite coatings and compared with Ti6Al4V alloy control samples. The tribological performance of the coatings were evaluated, in simulated body fluids, up to 1000 m sliding distance under 10 N normal load. The results show that the composite coatings contain distinct TiN particles embedded in α+β phase matrix. The average top surface hardness of Ti6Al4V alloy increased from 394±8HV to 1138±61HV with 40 wt% TiN reinforcement. Among the composite coatings, the coatings reinforced with 40 wt% TiN exhibited the highest wear resistance of 3.74×10−6mm3/Nm, which is lower than the wear rate, 1.04×10−5mm3/Nm, of laser processed CoCrMo alloy tested under identical experimental conditions. In vitro biocompatibility study showed that these composite coatings were non-toxic and provides superior cell–material interactions compared to Ti6Al4V control, as a result of their high surface energy. In summary, excellent in vitro wear resistance and biocompatibility of present laser processed TiN reinforced Ti6Al4V alloy composite coatings clearly show their potential as wear resistant contact surfaces for load bearing implant applications. [Display omitted] ► In vitro biocompatibility and wear performance of Ti6Al4V+TiN coatings were evaluated. ► Ti6Al4V alloy hardness increased from 394 to 1138 HV with 40% TiN reinforcement. ► Coatings with 40% TiN exhibited superior wear resistance compared to CoCrMo alloy. ► Composite coatings exhibited superior cell–material interactions than Ti6Al4V control

Evaluation of Cell Line Suitability for Disease Specific Perturbation Experiments.

Cell lines are widely used in translational biomedical research to study the genetic basis of diseases. A major approach for experimental disease modeling are genetic perturbation experiments that aim to trigger selected cellular disease states. In this type of experiments it is crucial to ensure that the targeted disease- related genes and pathways are intact in the used cell line. In this work we are developing a framework which integrates genetic sequence information and disease- specific network analysis for evaluating disease-specific cell line suitability

COLA: How to adapt vision-language models to Compose Objects Localized with Attributes?

Compositional reasoning is a hallmark of human visual intelligence; yet despite the size of large vision-language models, they struggle to represent simple compositions by combining objects with their attributes. To measure this lack of compositional capability, we design Cola, a text-to-image retrieval benchmark to Compose Objects Localized with Attributes. Using Cola as a testbed, we explore modeling designs to adapt pre-trained vision-language models to reason compositionally about multiple attributes attached to multiple objects. We explore 6 finetuning strategies on 2 seminal vision-language models, using 3 finetuning datasets and 2 test benchmarks (Cola and CREPE). Surprisingly, our optimal finetuning strategy improves a 151M parameter CLIP, which disjointly encodes image and language during pretraining, to perform as well as a 241M parameter FLAVA, which uses a multi-modal transformer encoder during pretraining to attend over both vision and language modalities. This optimal finetuning strategy is a lightweight multi-modal adapter that jointly attends over both image and language features generated by the pretrained model. We show this works better than common strategies such as prompt/fine-tuning, or tuning a comparable number of unimodal layers

Major changes of cell function and toxicant sensitivity in cultured cells undergoing mild, quasi-natural genetic drift

Genomic drift affects the functional properties of cell lines, and the reproducibility of data from in vitro studies. While chromosomal aberrations and mutations in single pivotal genes are well explored, little is known about effects of minor, possibly pleiotropic, genome changes. We addressed this question for the human dopaminergic neuronal precursor cell line LUHMES by comparing two subpopulations (SP) maintained either at the American-Type-Culture-Collection (ATCC) or by the original provider (UKN). Drastic differences in susceptibility towards the specific dopaminergic toxicant 1-methyl-4-phenylpyridinium (MPP+) were observed. Whole-genome sequencing was performed to identify underlying genetic differences. While both SP had normal chromosome structures, they displayed about 70 differences on the level of amino acid changing events. Some of these differences were confirmed biochemically, but none offered a direct explanation for the altered toxicant sensitivity pattern. As second approach, markers known to be relevant for the intended use of the cells were specifically tested. The “ATCC” cells rapidly down-regulated the dopamine-transporter and tyrosine-hydroxylase after differentiation, while “UKN” cells maintained functional levels. As the respective genes were not altered themselves, we conclude that polygenic complex upstream changes can have drastic effects on biochemical features and toxicological responses of relatively similar SP of cells