Journal Club for June 26

Introduction/Motivation Endothelial cell adherence mechanisms are well characterized in literature to date. Endothelial cells, such as HUVECs, interact with their substrate as well as surrounding cells through focal adhesions (network of proteins involved in cell adhesion; vinculin, talin, FAK, etc.), VE-cadherins, tight junctions, and other membrane bound molecules. These molecules work in combination to allow…

If you’re a researcher or student using SolidWorks on an Apple Silicon Mac, you’ve probably run into the same wall: SolidWorks doesn’t officially support virtualized environments, and getting it to run stably in VMware Fusion takes some work. After extensive troubleshooting, here is the complete step-by-step protocol that got SolidWorks 2025 running on an M5…

A few weeks ago, Josh and JP brought me some 3 window microslit membranes that had edge aligned 8 and 9 μm slits. While these may seem to be quite large for most applications, they are in fact perfect for working with whole blood. The experiments that we have planned for these membranes are based on the…

In our prior work we showed that endothelial cells form far fewer focal adhesions on microporous SiO2 membranes compared to non-porous SiO2 and tissue culture plastic (see prior post by Ana). We performed this analysis at 24 hours, which seems to be the standard in the literature. Interestingly, we found that the number of FAs…

The human IgG did not seem to diffuse through the membrane the first time we conducted a diffusion experiment. Barrett believed that the lack of diffusion was most likely due to protein aggregates blocking the pores. So, the human IgG was filtered, and this post is the result of a second round of diffusion experiments….

There were lots of interesting talks and posters on organ-on-a-chip models with emphasis on modeling blood-brain barrier. I have selected four of them as a summary. 3D model of diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma growth, migration and blood-brain barrier interactions Alanna M. Farrell, Raleigh M. Linville, Gabrielle N. Grifno, Peter C. Searson Johns Hopkins University, Department…