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Home > UC Science Today > The weekly roundup - July 1st
Podcast: UC Science Today
Episode:

The weekly roundup - July 1st
Category: Science & Medicine
Duration: 00:01:35
Publish Date: 2016-06-29 19:00:00
Description: This week on Science Today. Is there anything one can’t make with 3D printing technology? How about living blood vessels? We visit Monica Moya at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to find out more about how she created 3D bioprints of a vasculature system using natural ‘bioinks'. "So one of our inks is made out of the same stuff that you find in a blood clot. And we intentionally do this because we are in a sense, are co-engineering with the cells." Given this this ability to print vasculature, the feasibility of 3D printable organs doesn’t seem so farfetched anymore. On a somewhat related note, we next take a look at organoids, or miniature lab models that mimic the physiology of real organs. These systems are helping researchers in their quest to learn as much as possible about Zika virus. Finding a good lab model has been challenging, so UC San Francisco's Arnold Kriegstein and his colleagues are stepping in to examine the options. "We were looking at what other model systems could be used to study how the Zika virus infects cells". And we sort of went out on a limb for this last one. Nadav Ahituv of UCSF tells us about how novel genes associated with limb development in bats may help us understand how our own arms and legs grow. "So when our limbs grow, we basically have webbing between them, and then that webbing sort of dies, but in the bat forelimbs, that webbing remains and makes part of the wing." To listen to these and other episodes about University of California research, subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Facebook. I’m Larissa Branin. Thanks for listening. More information: Subscribe to Science Today on iTunes: apple.co/1TQBewD Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ucsciencetoday Stories mentioned in this roundup: https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/vasculature_bioprint https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/organoid_lab https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/limbs_bats
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