MEMs and membranes: a Liver Assist Device

I wanted to confirm my results from this previous post.  Here, I used lower concentrations of bafilomycin (10, 25 and 50nM) in growth media.  Everything else was the same (except the cells were 1 passage older). The results are the same-lots of vacuoles in the control sample and no vacuoles at all in any of…

I went over to RIT to work with JP on measuring the deflection of NPN and pnc-Si membranes as a function of pressure.  JP and Dave Fang did this work years ago, and we want to pick it up again to correlate with Sarah’s burst pressure data. We used the Veeco Wyko (white light interferometer)…

The following post is the abstract that I recently submitted for the BMES Annual Conference. Introduction: Permeable membranes provide a physiologically relevant cell culture substrate for in vitro study of barrier cell types, such as endothelial cells, which assume a polarized morphology with distinct apical and basolateral surfaces. Cell morphology and subsequent monolayer formation and…

The paper that came out from Shigeru’s laboratory earlier this year in Analyitical Chemistry (Ishimatsu et al. 2010 downloadable here) demonstrated that the permeability of pnc-Si membranes to small monovalent ions in 0.1 M salt is predictable from membrane geometry alone. The paper also shows that multivalent and/or large ions do not follow theory as…

Wafers 670 and 673 were made to have different cutoffs. I set up diffusion experiments with two chips from each wafer using protein standards. However after removing samples after 24 hours I noticed that both chips from w670 had fully discolored and the chips from w673 seem to have partially discolored. In all three cases…