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    Polymer Hydrogels to Guide Organotypic and Organoid Cultures
    (Weinheim : Wiley-VCH, 2020) Magno, Valentina; Meinhardt, Andrea; Werner, Carsten
    Human organotypic and organoid cultures provide increasingly life-like models of tissue/organ development and disease, enable more realistic drug screening, and may ultimately pave the way for new therapies. A broad variety of extracellular matrix-based or inspired materials is instrumental in these approaches. In this review article, the foundations of the related materials design are summarized with an emphasis on the advantages and limitations of decellularized and reconstituted biopolymeric matrices as well as biohybrid and fully synthetic polymer hydrogel systems applied to enable specific organotypic and organoid cultures. Recent progress in the fabrication of defined hydrogel systems offering thoroughly tunable biochemical and biophysical properties is highlighted. Potentialities of hydrogel-based approaches to address the persisting challenges of organoid technologies, namely scalability, connectivity/integration, reproducibility, parallelization, and in situ monitoring are discussed. © 2020 The Authors. Published by WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
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    Antiphase Boundaries Constitute Fast Cation Diffusion Paths in SrTiO3 Memristive Devices
    (Weinheim : Wiley-VCH, 2020) Heisig, Thomas; Kler, Joe; Du, Hongchu; Baeumer, Christoph; Hensling, Felix; Glöß, Maria; Moors, Marco; Locatelli, Andrea; Menteş, Tevfik Onur; Genuzio, Francesca; Mayer, Joachim; De Souza, Roger A.; Dittmann, Regina
    Resistive switching in transition metal oxide-based metal-insulator-metal structures relies on the reversible drift of ions under an applied electric field on the nanoscale. In such structures, the formation of conductive filaments is believed to be induced by the electric-field driven migration of oxygen anions, while the cation sublattice is often considered to be inactive. This simple mechanistic picture of the switching process is incomplete as both oxygen anions and metal cations have been previously identified as mobile species under device operation. Here, spectromicroscopic techniques combined with atomistic simulations to elucidate the diffusion and drift processes that take place in the resistive switching model material SrTiO3 are used. It is demonstrated that the conductive filament in epitaxial SrTiO3 devices is not homogenous but exhibits a complex microstructure. Specifically, the filament consists of a conductive Ti3+-rich region and insulating Sr-rich islands. Transmission electron microscopy shows that the Sr-rich islands emerge above Ruddlesden–Popper type antiphase boundaries. The role of these extended defects is clarified by molecular static and molecular dynamic simulations, which reveal that the Ruddlesden–Popper antiphase boundaries constitute diffusion fast-paths for Sr cations in the perovskites structure. © 2020 The Authors. Published by Wiley-VCH GmbH