Metallized Membranes

Introduction This experiment is a continuation of previous work, cited below. Instead of urea spiked 1x PBS, whole heparinized bovine blood was pushed through the device over a period of four hours to then perform a urea assay on the separated and collected plasma. Please refer to the post below regarding the experimental setup that…

We’ve been focusing on bicarbonate ions as one of the causes of discoloration. So, I made several sodium bicarbonate solutions and tracked discoloration of non-RTP’ed samples. I made 3.7 mg/mL NaHCO3 (=44mM, this is the concentration in DMEM), 1.85 mg/mL NaHCO3, 0.925 mg/mL NaHCO3, 0.4625 mg/mL NaHCO3 and 0.23125 mg/mL NaHCO3. I also ordered a…

As a quick update on the ECM masking with Parylene membrane, we made changes to the device designs. Instead of relying on the peel-off process, we used a simplified design, with the membrane serving as the roof of the channels. Here is the latest design:   For these experiments we continued to use relatively low…

This week I’ve added male connectors to my device. Originally, I had female-female tubing connections to the device, which were very prone to leaking around the insertion ports. Tejas suggested that I try printing out the male connectors to combat this problem. The tubing I’m using is ID=2 mm, OD= 5mm. It’s compliant enough to…

Before Anant left for India, we were doing cell adhesion studies with pnc-Si transwells and getting some weird morphologies.  Check it out here, here, here, here, here. This is in contrast with the 2D studies that Anant did for the cell culture paper in which cell adhesion looked good.  The main difference is the transwell…