Nanopocket Membrane Fabrication-Update
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…
I had previously manufactured some freestanding MgF2 nanomembranes (50 nm MgF2, starting from Wafer Template 1174) for my work here in Nottingham. I shipped about 75 chips at the beginning of July in my 3d printed holders, however, they arrived with a noticeable film discoloration (tending to blue/tan, rather than the nice purple color I had…
I tested five types of track-etched membranes (with pore diameters 0.1, 0.08, 0.05, 0.03 and 0.01micron). All of them are 6micron thick and usually have 14-16% porosity. First experiment was to confirm the official air flow rates data with our setup. The measurements are taken at 10psi (as the ones that company did). The results…
Introduction Tissue barriers separate different compartments of body organs. These barriers regulate the absorption of nutrients, maintain homeostasis, and prevent toxins from entering. In vitro models of tissue barriers have been developed to understand human diseases and investigate drug toxicity and effectiveness. In order to investigate cell-cell junctions and barrier maturity created on these models,…
My last cell post involved pictures of HUVECs after 1 day of growth on commercial transwells and pnc-Si Sepcons. Over the past week, I’ve been growing HUVEC on commercial PC transwells and pnc-Si in the Sepcon format in order to track the TEER. To get more data out of these cells, I decided to do…
The presented post is somewhat of a follow-up of this previous post, in which we studied the adsorption of proteins on silanized NPN chips. In the presented work, we study the adsorption of fluorescent proteins (BSA and IgG) on both the untreated and the PEGylated nanoporous nitride membrane (NPN) chips using epifluorescence as the imaging…