In a first attempt to reduce the electrostatic drag that might be slowing water transport, I ran an experiment with 1x PBS. The membranes were first ozone treated and then assembled into the SepCon inserts.
From these first trials, it appears that PBS does pass through more quickly than DI water.
Here is a look at all our water permeability through nanomembranes to-date. There appears to be subtle trends showing increasing permeability with radial position (r – values) and a not-so-subtle trend showing decreasing flow with protein (cyt and albumin). Note that with the more recent membranes we’ve been able to do repeats. The permeabilities are…
Vacuoles with pulling flow vs pushing flow This video shows an example of the first trials with the uSim flow cell (Tejas’ early versions) when creating laminar flow over a monolayer of BLECs – see Mossu et al, JCBFM 2018 – the issue we had to overcome was to avoid creating vacuoles in the endothelial…
Summary and Instructional video The simplest way to get something wet is to allow water to condense on the surface of the something. In our case, we have a number of nanocavities (~ 0.1 femtoliters) with porous tents over them. The easiest thing to do is simply chill the substrates down to allow condensation to form….
This summer I’ll be working on preliminary development of technology that might lead to SiMPore drug discovery assays. The goal is to use SiMPore membranes to create much more efficient and generalized assays, which represents a big opportunity for the company. However, several challenges need to be addressed in order to make such a device…
In my previous post, I showed images of bEnd (P8) cells on PET and pnc-Si transwells. These were seeded at 105 cells/cm2 and grown for 14 days. This post contains the TEER data. I simply normalized all values to the Day 0 (no cells) resistance, so everything starts at 100%. This data for PET matches…