EurekAlert reports on a new lab on a chip system to study brain chemistry:

Johns Hopkins researchers from the Whiting School of Engineering and the School of Medicine have devised a micro-scale tool -- a lab on a chip -- designed to mimic the chemical complexities of the brain. The system should help scientists better understand how nerve cells in the brain work together to form the nervous system.

”The chip we’ve developed will make experiments on nerve cells more simple to conduct and to control,” says Andre Levchenko, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and faculty affiliate of the Institute for NanoBioTechnology.

Nerve cells decide which direction to grow by sensing both the chemical cues flowing through their environment as well as those attached to the surfaces that surround them. The chip, which is made of a plastic-like substance and covered with a glass lid, features a system of channels and wells that allow researchers to control the flow of specific chemical cocktails around single nerve cells....

“The ability to combine several different stimuli in the chip resembles a more realistic environment that nerve cells will encounter in the living animal,” [Institute for Cell Engineering professor Guo-li] Ming says. This in turn will make future studies on the role of neuronal cells in development and regeneration more accurate and complete.