Sequential Coupling Shows Minor Effects of Fluid Dynamics on Myocardial Deformation in a Realistic Whole-Heart Model

Background: The human heart is a masterpiece of the highest complexity coordinating multi-physics aspects on a multi-scale range. Thus, modeling the cardiac function in silico to reproduce physiological characteristics and diseases remains challenging. Especially the complex simulation of the blood's hemodynamics and its interaction with the myocardial tissue requires a high accuracy of the underlying computational models and solvers. These demanding aspects make whole-heart fully-coupled simulations computationally highly expensive and call for simpler but still accurate models. While the mechanical deformation during the heart cycle drives the blood flow, less is known about the feedback of the blood flow onto the myocardial tissue.Methods and Results: To solve the fluid-structure interaction problem, we suggest a cycle-to-cycle coupling of the structural deformation and the fluid dynamics. In a first step, the displacement of the endocardial wall in the mechanical simulation serves as a unidirectional boundary condition for the fluid simulation. After a complete heart cycle of fluid simulation, a spatially resolved pressure factor (PF) is extracted and returned to the next iteration of the solid mechanical simulation, closing the loop of the iterative coupling procedure. All simulations were performed on an individualized whole heart geometry. The effect of the sequential coupling was assessed by global measures such as the change in deformation and—as an example of diagnostically relevant information—the particle residence time. The mechanical displacement was up to 2 mm after the first iteration. In the second iteration, the deviation was in the sub-millimeter range, implying that already one iteration of the proposed cycle-to-cycle coupling is sufficient to converge to a coupled limit cycle.Conclusion: Cycle-to-cycle coupling between cardiac mechanics and fluid dynamics can be a promising approach to account for fluid-structure interaction with low computational effort. In an individualized healthy whole-heart model, one iteration sufficed to obtain converged and physiologically plausible results.

Efficient multi-gene expression in cell-free droplet microreactors

Cell-free transcription and translation systems promise to accelerate and simplify the engineering of proteins, biological circuits and metabolic pathways. Their encapsulation on microfluidic platforms can generate millions of cell-free reactions in picoliter volume droplets. However, current methods struggle to create DNA diversity between droplets while also reaching sufficient protein expression levels. In particular, efficient multi-gene expression has remained elusive. We here demonstrate that co-encapsulation of DNA-coated beads with a defined cell-free system allows high protein expression while also supporting genetic diversity between individual droplets. We optimize DNA loading on commercially available microbeads through direct binding as well as through the sequential coupling of up to three genes via a solid-phase Golden Gate assembly or BxB1 integrase-based recombineering. Encapsulation with an off-the-shelf microfluidics device allows for single or multiple protein expression from a single DNA-coated bead per 14 pL droplet. We envision that this approach will help to scale up and parallelize the rapid prototyping of more complex biological systems.

A study on influence of strong magnetic field on fracture of interface crack considering magneto-elastic coupling effects

The influence of strong magnetic field on stress intensity factor of an interface crack is studied in this paper. The nonlinear piezomagnetic property and magnetostriction effect have been taken into consideration in the theoretical analyses. This multi-field coupled problem is solved through a sequential coupling approach. The perturbed magnetization caused by the deformation around the crack is solved under magnetic boundary conditions. After modified by the perturbed magnetization, the initial loads are updated with magnetic forces for iterative calculation. With this strategy, the distributions of the stress and displacement at the crack region approach to the real solution gradually. Numerical results show that the influence of the external magnetic field on fracture behaviors is not ignorable. For structures with interface crack serving in a strong magnetic field, e.g., the multi-layer welded structures in the Tokamak device, the magneto-elastic coupling effects have to be considered to deal with its fracture problem.

Effect of Computational Schemes on Coupled Flow and Geo-Mechanical Modeling of CO2 Leakage through a Compromised Well

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) describes a set of technically viable processes to separate carbon dioxide (CO2) from industrial byproduct streams and inject it into deep geologic formations for long-term storage. Legacy wells located within the spatial domain of new injection and production activities represent potential pathways for fluids (i.e., CO2 and aqueous phase) to leak through compromised components (e.g., through fractures or micro-annulus pathways). The finite element (FE) method is a well-established numerical approach to simulate the coupling between multi-phase fluid flow and solid phase deformation interactions that occur in a compromised well system. We assumed the spatial domain consists of a three-phases system: a solid, liquid, and gas phase. For flow in the two fluids phases, we considered two sets of primary variables: the first considering capillary pressure and gas pressure (PP) scheme, and the second considering liquid pressure and gas saturation (PS) scheme. Fluid phases were coupled with the solid phase using the full coupling (i.e., monolithic coupling) and iterative coupling (i.e., sequential coupling) approaches. The challenge of achieving numerical stability in the coupled formulation in heterogeneous media was addressed using the mass lumping and the upwinding techniques. Numerical results were compared with three benchmark problems to assess the performance of coupled FE solutions: 1D Terzaghi’s consolidation, Liakopoulos experiments, and the Kueper and Frind experiments. We found good agreement between our results and the three benchmark problems. For the Kueper and Frind test, the PP scheme successfully captured the observed experimental response of the non-aqueous phase infiltration, in contrast to the PS scheme. These exercises demonstrate the importance of fluid phase primary variable selection for heterogeneous porous media. We then applied the developed model to the hypothetical case of leakage along a compromised well representing a heterogeneous media. Considering the mass lumping and the upwinding techniques, both the monotonic and the sequential coupling provided identical results, but mass lumping was needed to avoid numerical instabilities in the sequential coupling. Additionally, in the monolithic coupling, the magnitude of primary variables in the coupled solution without mass lumping and the upwinding is higher, which is essential for the risk-based analyses.

Scalable One-Pot - Liquid-Phase Oligonucleotide Synthesis for Model Network Hydrogels

Solid-phase oligonucleotide synthesis (SPOS) based on phosphoramidite chemistry is currently the most widespread technique for DNA and RNA synthesis, but suffers from scalability limitations and high reagent consumption. Liquid-phase oligonucleotide synthesis (LPOS) uses soluble polymer supports and has the potential of being scalable. However, at present, LPOS requires 3 separate reaction steps and 4-5 precipitation steps per nucleotide addition. Moreover, long acid exposure times during the deprotection step degrade sequences with high A-content (adenine) due to depurination and chain cleavage. In this work, we present the first one-pot liquid-phase DNA synthesis technique, which allows the addition of one nucleotide in a one-pot reaction of sequential coupling, oxidation and deprotection, followed by a single precipitation step. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to suppress depurination during the addition of adenine nucleotides. We showcase the potential of this technique to prepare high-purity 4-arm PEG‑T₂₀ (T = thymine) and 4-arm PEG-A₂₀building blocks in multi-gram scale. Such complementary 4-arm PEG-DNA building blocks reversibly self-assemble into supramolecular model network hydrogels, and facilitate the elucidation of bond lifetimes. These model network hydrogels exhibit new levels of mechanical properties, high stability at room temperature (melting at 44 ‎°C), and thus open up pathways to next-generation, scalable DNA-materials programmable through sequence recognition and available for macroscale applications<i>.</i>