FernUni Schweiz

Regenerative cardiology recently advanced in patient–specific medicine by employing somatic cells to derive pluripotent stem cells and differentiate them into cardiomyocytes. Resulting populations present an immature phenotype; the Dynamic Clamp technique is a popular experimental manipulation to induce electronic maturation towards an adult phenotype. In this work, we present a fully virtual framework to study this Dynamic Clamp technique, based on the injection of the inward-rectifier potassium current into the myocyte, taking into account six different current formulations. We investigate the effects of the current injection on the action potential morphology and on three specific biomarkers for different current percentages, and we compare resulting morphologies with the standard transmembrane potential profile of a human adult cardiomyocyte. The results of this quantitative analysis suggest that atrial–like potassium current formulations allow the cell to reach action potential features comparable with the ones of mature cells, preventing the cell to show a non physiological morphology.

Universal suffrage is a core element of democracy. However, in many democratic countries, a large part of the inhabitants are foreigners without suffrage. We analyze the conditions under which domestic citizens are willing to extend suffrage to non-citizen residents. This paper explores a new panel dataset (1992–2016) of Swiss referenda on the enfranchisement of non-citizens. We concentrate on the size and composition of the foreign population and the institutional context as determinants of non-citizens’ enfranchisement. Our estimates show that a higher share of foreigners corresponds to a lower willingness of natives to enfranchise non-citizens. This effect seems to be driven by the cost of enfranchising non-citizens, which increases in the cultural distance between the foreign and native population and the strength of direct democracy.