HUVEC adhesion update

In order to further test the model, I’ve set up additional rhodamine diffusion assays.  In each case, the setup is similar to the nanoparticle/protein/dna separations –  20 uL of .5 mM rhodamine on the top of a SepCon and 20 uL .1 M KCl on the bottom.  Two different membrane geometries were used so far…

Background: Similar to the Gaborski lab, the authors of the publication “Microfabrication of high-resolution porous membranes for cell culture” fabricated and characterized ultra-thin polymeric membranes for use as cell culture substrates. Upon reviewing their publication, Tom and I discussed some of the experiments that we’d like to replicate to further characterize the SiO2 membrane for our…

I’ve been working with the AFM recently and have had some success getting images on supported pnc-Si films. Yesterday, I imaged three samples from sc 698: one untreated pnc-Si film and two films coated with aluminum oxide (1.5 nm and 5 nm thickness). Here are the scans (500 nm x 500 nm). The topmost scan…

My last experiment did not go as planned, but the results are very interesting nevertheless, and might provide another interesting application for these tw0-membrane systems that we had not yet considered. The start of the experiment went as planned: painted PDMS on the chip, used additional PDMS to glue the gasket to the PDMS layer,…

The presented post is somewhat of a follow-up of this previous post, in which we studied the adsorption of proteins on silanized NPN chips. In the presented work, we study the adsorption of fluorescent proteins (BSA and IgG) on both the untreated and the PEGylated nanoporous nitride membrane (NPN) chips using epifluorescence as the imaging…