FROM THE LABS.
Banana bandages
An ecofriendly wound dressing material made using banana fibres presents a sustainable solution for wound care.
India, the world’s largest bananafarming country, has an abundance of banana pseudostems, discarded after harvest.
In a pioneering effort, scientists at the Institute of Advanced Study in Science and Technology (IASST), an autonomous institute under the Department of Science and Technology, have transformed the banana pseudostems — often considered agricultural waste — into an ecofriendly wound dressing material.
Led by Prof Devasish Chowdhury and Prof (Retd) Rajlakshmi Devi, the research team, including Mridusmita Barman, a research scholar in the IASSTDeakin University Joint PhD programme, have combined the banana fibres with biopolymers like chitosan and guar gum to create a multifunctional patch with excellent mechanical strength and antioxidant properties.
Taking it a step further, the researchers loaded the patch with an extract from the
Vitex negundo plant and demonstrated its capabilities in invitro drug release and as antibacterial agents. All the materials used in creating this innovative dressing material are natural and locally available, making the manufacturing process simple, costeffective and nontoxic.
The wound dressing material presents additional uses for the abundant banana plant, which may benefit farmers and minimise environmental impact.
“This investigation opens the door to a new era in wound healing, offering a lowcost, reliable and environmentfriendly alternative that holds significant potential in biomedical research,” says Prof Chowdhury. Elsevier recently published this work in the
International Journal of Biological Macromolecules.
Making tissues from autologous blood
A new model for generating mass of neurovascular tissues or neurovascular organoids/embryoids (NVOEs) from autologous blood — blood collected from the same individual to whom it is transfused — can help in the investigation of impaired brain functioning and development by analysing in neuroimaging (preclinical) scans, correlating with altered blood supply.
Neural organoids are threedimensional miniature human brain models grown in vitro (in a laboratory setting). These organoids are derived from human pluripotent stem cells, which can differentiate into various cell types found in the brain.
The field of neural organoids is rapidly progressing and has fuelled the hope for improved understanding of brain development and functions, modelling of neural diseases, and supply of surrogate sources of transplantation.
Most such neuronal organoids are derived from genetic overexpression of embryonic/extraembryonic transcription factors and they lack vascularisation (developing blood vessels). As an advancement, a new approach of coculturing blood vessel organoids with cerebral organoids was recently proposed, they lacked active blood flow and were very laborious and not costeffective. The most advanced embryo models with neurogenesis /organogenesis also lack functional vasculature and hence have limited scope for modeling brainactivity based investigative studies.
As an answer to this challenge, researchers of Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education & Research, Chandigarh, have come up with a prototype for establishment and characterisation of novel selforganising neurovascular organoids/ embryoids made entirely from autologous blood without any genetic manoeuvring, says a press release.