Modeling the Human Placenta in Vitro
Senior Students: Li Ying Wang, Lunan Shao, Orysya Stus, Sana Hussain
Project Advisors: Dr. Prashant Mali, Dr. Mana M. Parast
Group 15, Spring 2016
Background: Our Model and Senior Design
The Senior Design Sequence
The senior design sequence at UCSD consists of 4 consecutive one-unit lecture courses and 2 three-unit lab courses. Groups of 4-5 students are formed and each group is assigned a project in which they work alongside a faculty project advisor, or in some case alongside industry professionals. The first quarter introduces juniors to the different design projects, and allows them to watch the current seniors present the data and conclusion from their experiments. This allows the juniors to recognize the different projects available to choose from and work on in their next year. Over the summer groups are formed and literature research is done in regards to the project selected. The second quarter allows the groups to plan, prepare, and compare their design alternatives while the third quarter is reserved for experimentations, data collection, and data analysis. In the fourth quarter, presentations are given to the future seniors and posters are made and displayed at the annual Bioengineering Day.
The Human Placenta
The Human Placenta
The Human Placenta
The placenta is an important organ that connects the mother to the developing fetus, and is primarily involved with transport of various substances such as food, waste, and oxygen between the two. A placenta begins to form when a blastocyst implants itself into the maternal endometrium and the outer layer of this blastocyst divides into either cytotrophoblasts which form the anchoring villi, or into synctyiotrophoblasts which form the chorionic villi. The anchoring villi functions for mechanical stability of the placenta while the chorionic villi invades the uterus and participates in fetomaternal nutrient and gas exchange and because of this functions, we chose to focus on modeling that portion of the placenta and mimic its structure.
The Cells
In our project, all the cells that we used to create our design are already fluorescently tagged as shown here in this image where the trophoblast stem cells are infected with dt-tomato so they fluoresce red when imaged.