Hemodialysis update – Feb. 2013

Introduction In an effort to move forward with a ‘lung microvasculature on a chip’ model, I have been experimenting with using primary human pulmonary microvascular endothelial cells in our devices. The cells (HPMECs) are purchased from Promocell and are collected from a single donor lung. Unfortunately I found little information on their use in recent…

Wet Etching of Optical Thin Films   As a result of Christian’s trip and Kevin’s discussions with me, I have been wondering if we could make nanoporous MgF2 membranes for Raman spectroscopy. Part of the appeal in using our Si-based nanomembranes is that the volume they occupy in the observation space is extremely minimal. Even…

This post relates to the ongoing project and potential grant between Integrated Nano-Technologies, Simpore, and NRG. The goal of my research is to show that our membranes can be integrated into Nano-Technologies’ device. Our membranes must be able to filter out or hold back large debris that can cause false positives in their device, while…

I’ve been wondering if there were differences in actin/cytoskeletal structure of cells on supported vs. free-standing pnc-Si.  A couple weeks ago, I had a couple of extra pnc-Si transwells so I stained for actin. I followed the actin staining (rhodamine-phalloidin) method I uploaded to the protocols section of the lab, and I counterstained the nuclei…

These are the graphs with burst pressures for wafers 187, 189, 310, 312 and updated burst pressure bookMembrane_Burst_Book.xls The orange columns in the graphs indicate samples that I used for air permeability tests before.

This post is a follow-up to Professor McGrath’s post, “Permeabilities vs. pore sizes for ideal membranes.” In the aforementioned post, this equation is proposed: Ψ = Nπr2 Where Ψ is the porosity, N is the density of the pores, and r is the pore radius. Rearranging the above equation (assuming a constant porosity): Ψi =…