Endothelial cells on small square membranes
I designed new masks with different sized squares and slits in order to study how the aspect ratio of free-standing membranes would affect endothelial cells. In this 1st experiment, I seeded bEnd at 50000 cells/cm2 and let them grow for 4 days. I then stained the cells with Live/Dead and overlaid the phase channel in blue to show where the membranes were located. I’m not including all of the different sized squares in this post – just the 2 smallest designs. These results are interesting because it (almost) shows vacuole expression at a single cell level.
In the image below, about 2 cells are growing across each membrane (these are the smallest square membranes I had made). It looks like those cells on the membranes have vacuoles. Also, some cells that are partly over the membranes expressed vacuoles on supported pnc-Si.
These are slightly larger membranes (~5-6 cells per membrane). On these membranes, vacuole expression seems to be limited to free-standing membranes only.
