Indigenous Sand Drawings as Predictors of the Cell Response to Nanoparticle Therapy

Abstract

A technique for predicting the response of cells and tissues to a physicochemical stimulus without the use of expensive molecular markers and at time points before any morphological changes can be visibly spotted would be a meaningful addendum to the current set of bioimaging tools. One such method was developed here based on correlating transformed distance matrices of populations of cultured cells and digital checkerboard patterns derived from traditional central African drawings in the sand. Similarity measurements were made at an early time point in the therapy administered to bone cancer cells in the form of composite magnetic nanoparticles. At this early of a time point, the cell viability was mildly reduced, but no gross alterations to the cell morphology or density were visible yet. Similarity score evaluation demonstrated a significantly higher degree of similarity between the patterns derived from the sand drawings and the cells subjected to the treatment than between the former patterns and the untreated cell controls. The treated cells produced more ordered and symmetric patterns than the control ones after the processing of their pairwise distant matrices, explaining their better geometric correlation with the ancestral sand arabesques, which were monolinear and commonly comprised multiple mirror planes and rotational symmetry axes. This has suggested that the course of the therapy could be predicted by a relatively simple comparison between raw optical images of cells and indigenous ideographs using the metrics postulated here. The interdisciplinary method developed in this study may prove applicable for in situ monitoring of the response of cells and tissues to various therapies, allowing for the early indications of adverse effects to be noticed based on the simple optical observations of cells and acted upon before the progression toward nonviable states becomes irreversible. The method elaborated here may also provide an impetus for a broader search for solutions to problems plaguing the modern medicine outside of the scope of its mainstream analytical frameworks and in the ancestral heritage of relatively obscure ethnic traditions.

Micronesian maritime piloting charts as bioimaging proxies for the rescue of cells on the apoptotic trajectory

“…This significantly higher etak number for cells in the treated population as compared to the control may be a consequence of the earlier detected dispersal of the cells after the treatment and their yielding more regular distance matrix patterns than the control, untreated populations [ 50 ]. The latter effect may be explained by the natural tendency of cells that have embarked on the apoptotic path as the result of the therapy or other stimuli to individuate and estrange themselves from the cellular community, an effect that at the spatial level manifests itself as equidistant or semi-equidistant separation.…”

How the Game of Soccer can Foster Creative Research in Natural Sciences

“…Analytics making use of the real-time acquisition of positional data pertaining to the movement of the ball and of every player on the pitch so as to predict the goals and other key events in a game are intensely researched, but are yet to make groundbreaking strides (Rein & Memmert 2016;Mead et al 2023). Nevertheless, it is foreseeable that advances in the science of proxemics, which has been appliedwith success in cell and population biology (Uskoković et al 2022;Uskoković 2022a;Uskoković 2022b), will expand the knowledge on optimal teamwork in soccer. For example, individual player's heat maps and kinematic variables indicative of distances between players, spaces covered by players and other collective patterns within a team are being routinely collected using global and local positioning systems and video cameras (Rico-González et al 2020;Errekagorri et al 2022;Moniz Carvalho et al 2021) and fed into data analytics models ranging from as simple as Goals Added (G+) (Muller 2023) or Expected Goals (xG) (Kullowatz 2017) to more complex ones, but their potentials for use in creating precise tactical setups and boosting the team performance are just starting to be unlocked.…”