Putting women's economic empowerment in the Asia Pacific at the core of the G20

For more about the East-West Center, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/This paper presents background and resource information used to develop the formal report for the Inaugural 2017 Women20 for the G20 Asia-Pacific Dialogue, hosted by the East-West Center and sponsored by the global professional services organization EY. Participants included current and former heads of state, government officials, academic experts, representatives of regional and international organizations, business, and civil society leaders

Decellularized grass as a sustainable scaffold for skeletal muscle tissue engineering

Scaffold materials suitable for the scale-up and subsequent commercialization of tissue engineered products should ideally be cost effective and accessible. For the in vitro culture of certain adherent cells, synthetic fabrication techniques are often employed to produce micro- or nano-patterned substrates to influence cell attachment, morphology, and alignment via the mechanism of contact guidance. Here we present a natural scaffold, in the form of decellularized amenity grass, which retains its natural striated topography and supports the attachment, proliferation, alignment and differentiation of murine C2C12 myoblasts, without the need for additional functionalization. This presents an inexpensive, sustainable scaffold material and structure for tissue engineering applications capable of influencing cell alignment, a desired property for the culture of skeletal muscle and other anisotropic tissues.The raw and processed quantitative data required to reproduce these findings are available to download from http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/5mgnz3zrmv.

Environmental impacts of cultured meat: alternative production scenarios

Cultured meat is produced by culturing animal muscle tissue in a laboratory without growing the whole animals. Its development is currently in a research stage. An earlier study showed that cultured meat production could potentially have substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions, land use and water use compared to conventionally produced meat. The aim of this paper is to amend the previous study by considering alternative production scenarios. The impacts of replacing cyanobacteria based nutrient media with plant based media are assessed. This paper includes more specific modelling of a bioreactor suitable for cultured meat production. Further, this study estimates the water footprint of cultured meat based on a method that is compliant with life cycle assessment. The environmental impacts of cultured meat are compared with conventionally produced meat and with plant based protein sources. It is concluded that regardless of the high uncertainty ranges cultured meat has potential to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions and land use when compared to conventionally produced meat.JRC.H.4-Monitoring Agricultural Resource

Prospective life cycle assessment of a bioprocess design for cultured meat production in hollow fiber bioreactors

The aim of cellular agriculture is to use cell-culturing technologies to produce alternatives to agricultural products. Cul-tured meat is an example of a cellular agriculture product, made by using tissue engineering methods. This study aims to improve the understanding of the potential environmental impacts of cultured meat production by comparing be-tween different bioprocess design scenarios. This was done by carrying out a life cycle assessment (LCA) for a bioprocess system using hollow fiber bioreactors, and utilizing bench-scale experimental data for C2C12 cell prolifer-ation, differentiation and media metabolism. Scenario and sensitivity analyses were used to test the impact of changes in the system design, data sources, and LCA methods on the results to support process design decision making. We com-pared alternative scenarios to a baseline of C2C12 cells cultured in hollow fiber bioreactors using media consisting of DMEM with serum, for a 16-day proliferation stage and 7-day differentiation stage. The baseline LCA used the average UK electricity mix as the energy source, and heat treatment for wastewater sterilization. The greatest reduction in en-vironmental impacts were achieved with the scenarios using CHO cell metabolism instead of C2C12 cell metabolisim (64-67 % reduction); achieving 128 % cell biomass increase during differentiation instead of no increase (42-56 % reduction); using wind electricity instead of average UK electricity (6-39 % reduction); and adjusting the amino acid use based on experimental data (16-27 % reduction). The use of chemical wastewater treatment instead of heat treatment increased all environmental impacts, except energy demand, by 1-16 %. This study provides valuable insights for the cultured meat field to understand the effects of different process design scenarios on environmental impacts, and therefore provides a framework for deciding where to focus development efforts for improving the envi-ronmental performance of the production system.Peer reviewe

Development of a novel hollow fibre membrane for use as a tissue engineered bone graft scaffold

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Hollow-fiber membrane technology: Characterization and proposed use as a potential mimic of skin vascularization towards the development of a novel skin absorption in vitro model

Dermal bioavailability is currently estimated through skin penetration studies using ex vivo models, which lack any measure of capillary bed function, and thus do not fully reproduce physiological conditions. We propose a novel strategy to mimic skin vascularization using newly fabricated hollow fibers made from a biocompatible membrane material, polystyrene, which is hydrophobic if left untreated, or hydrophilic when its surface polarity is modified through plasma-treatment. Caffeine has been well studied in skin penetration assays and was used here to determine the permeation properties of the hollow fibers in a novel jacketed glass bioreactor. For hydrophobic fibers, approximately 87.2 % of the caffeine dose did not penetrate the porous surface; 0.2 % of the dose was collected after 24 h (permeated through the pores), and therefore 12.6 % of the initial dose was suspected to block the membrane. For hydrophilic fibers, both the percentage of the initial dose that permeated and that of blocking caffeine increased to 1.2 % and 35.2 % respectively. It was concluded that caffeine permeated the hollow fibers at similar times of clearance to those observed in vivo, and therefore shows that this new model could provide a surrogate for capillary-based clearance in in vitro skin absorption studies

A Systematically Reduced Mathematical Model for Organoid Expansion

Organoids are three-dimensional multicellular tissue constructs. When cultured in vitro, they recapitulate the structure, heterogeneity, and function of their in vivo counterparts. As awareness of the multiple uses of organoids has grown, e.g. in drug discovery and personalised medicine, demand has increased for low-cost and efficient methods of producing them in a reproducible manner and at scale. Here we focus on a bioreactor technology for organoid production, which exploits fluid flow to enhance mass transport to and from the organoids. To ensure large numbers of organoids can be grown within the bioreactor in a reproducible manner, nutrient delivery to, and waste product removal from, the organoids must be carefully controlled. We develop a continuum mathematical model to investigate how mass transport within the bioreactor depends on the inlet flow rate and cell seeding density, focusing on the transport of two key metabolites: glucose and lactate. We exploit the thin geometry of the bioreactor to systematically simplify our model. This significantly reduces the computational cost of generating model solutions, and provides insight into the dominant mass transport mechanisms. We test the validity of the reduced models by comparison with simulations of the full model. We then exploit our reduced mathematical model to determine, for a given inlet flow rate and cell seeding density, the evolution of the spatial metabolite distributions throughout the bioreactor. To assess the bioreactor transport characteristics, we introduce metrics quantifying glucose conversion (the ratio between the total amounts of consumed and supplied glucose), the maximum lactate concentration, the proportion of the bioreactor with intolerable lactate concentrations, and the time when intolerable lactate concentrations are first experienced within the bioreactor. We determine the dependence of these metrics on organoid-line characteristics such as proliferation rate and rate of glucose consumption per cell. Finally, for a given organoid line, we determine how the distribution of metabolites and the associated metrics depend on the inlet flow rate. Insights from this study can be used to inform bioreactor operating conditions, ultimately improving the quality and number of bioreactor-expanded organoids

Surfactant-free poly(lactide-co-glycolide) honeycomb films for tissue engineering: relating solvent, monomer ratio and humidity to scaffold structure

International audienceOne-step surfactant-free, water-droplet templating has been developed as a fabrication method for a poly(lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) film that can be used as a model to investigate the relationship between solvent, monomer ratio, polymer concentration and humidity on its structure. The resulting material is a honeycomb-structured film. Formation of this structure was highly sensitive to solvent, monomer ratio, polymer concentration and humidity. Surfactant-free, water-droplet templating thus allows investigation of fabrication parameters and that PLGA monomer ratio selection is important for scaffold structure but not for MG63 cell attachment and proliferation

Phonetic variability and grammatical knowledge: an articulatory study of Korean place assimilation.

The study reported here uses articulatory data to investigate Korean place assimilation of coronal stops followed by labial or velar stops, both within words and across words. The results show that this place-assimilation process is highly variable, both within and across speakers, and is also sensitive to factors such as the place of articulation of the following consonant, the presence of a word boundary and, to some extent, speech rate. Gestures affected by the process are generally reduced categorically (deleted), while sporadic gradient reduction of gestures is also observed. We further compare the results for coronals to our previous findings on the assimilation of labials, discussing implications of the results for grammatical models of phonological/phonetic competence. The results suggest that speakers’ language-particular knowledge of place assimilation has to be relatively detailed and context-sensitive, and has to encode systematic regularities about its obligatory/variable application as well as categorical/gradient realisation