Fabrication of silicon membrane using polymer self-assembly template

The overarching goal of this collaboration is to expose students and faculty at primarily-undegraduate institutions to the technology & expertise available at the University of Rochester.  We would like to make this kind of experience a recurring theme at URNano, and we expect to lay the foundations of such a program during the Summer of…

In this post, I’m going to discuss the results of the different PEG molecular on silane samples. We used same condition to make 4 chips for each sample. And we treat them with BSA, IgG, and PBS to rest the adsorption. We are using the SEM, contact angle and XPS as the testing method. The way we…

Hi everyone, in this update I’m going to go over some of the highlights from my experiments over the last month. After going through several trials that ultimately ended in failure, we moved over to testing long term performance of a 2.7% porosity nano-porous membrane (avg. pore diameter of 33.2 nm) by assessing it in…

The Barcikowski samples, sent from Germany a month ago, continue to be a fecund source of inconsistant data. Using the DLS to monitor several filtrations has resulted in a series of baffling results that I think I’ve finally begun to understand. First, the promising results: A DLS of Sample 1 (a mixture of bioconjugated gold…

Today I performed a coating of n-Dodecyl β-D-Maltoside (“DDM”) on PDMS in an attempt to block protein adsorption (reference). The reference describes two different procedures, one in which the protein being incubated on the PDMS surface is in solution with DDM, and one in which the DDM coating is performed before the sample is washed…

Background Focal adhesions occur in 2D cell cultures as substrates apply large forces on cells. Previous experiments showed that focal adhesions formed on TCP and on non-porous SiO2 membranes but that less formed on 3.0µm-pore SiO2 porous membranes and even less on 0.5µm-pore SiO2 porous membranes. In other words, as area between pores decreased, formation…