Introduction Over the past year, our lab has been working in close collaboration with the Schwarz lab to design, develop, and manufacture microfluidic transwells for their P50 project. The project was initiated after the discovery of S. aureus migration through sub-micron canaliculi in vivo. To further explore the genes involved in this newly proposed mechanism of immune…
Introduction Since development, much μ-NPN work has been focused on observing cell adherence under flow, cell morphology on deferentially spaced pores, and neutrophil transmigration. This post will detail the entirety of my work with these membranes to date, and plans going forward. Previous Membranes Prior to μ-NPN development, we worked primarily with the microporous SiO2 and NPN….
Introduction As a continuation to my previous post, I am running a triplicate of cell culture adhesion tests to observe cell lose on our membranes following physiological shear stress. Methods HUVECs (P3,4,5) were seed within our mimetic and left to grow to confluent for 24 hours. Shear (4.5 dyn/cm2) was initiated and images were collected…
Introduction/Motivation A problem many of us face in day to day research is the ability to change membrane format in a days to weeks notice. The cost of developing an entire new wafer of membranes for preliminary experiments is costly and time consuming. This cost and time increases when complex formatting is desired. All of…
Motivation and Procedure After discovering that pores on 3um LP SiO2 membranes seem to get blocked following 3 hours of shear [of HUVECs], Kilean and I decided to utilized SEM to further inspect what might be doing the occluding. HUVECs were seeded onto the membranes as usual and left to grow to confluent for 24…
Introduction I am working part time in collaboration with the Schwarz lab (CMSR, University or Rochester) on a bacterial migration project that includes the use of SimPore’s membranes. In order to increase throughput, Aline was contracted out to manufacture multiplex devices designed by Jim, Elysia Masters and myself. One aspect we would like to probe…
Introduction When concerning the issue of adherence on any substrate, the main two interactions that matter most are that of the cell interacting with the basement membrane (whether cell produced or artificially added) or the interaction between the protein based basement membrane and the substrate providing structure for cell culture; in our case SiO2 membranes….
Introduction The on going work for the dialysis project at UR has undergone changes and many hours of trouble shooting over the past semester. We are at a point now that I would like to share all the work I have done up until this point including assay development, method progression, and the experiments we…
Background For the in vitro portion of our dialysis project here at UR, we have settled on using two major experiments to test our devices for eventual transition to an in vivo model. These experiments include a single pass system using multiple syringe pumps to observe the effects of fouling on our membrane as well…
Introduction Endothelial cell detachment under flow on porous substrates has been a concern in our sepsis research since I began my work in the lab, and some time before that as well. As we plan on moving to microfluidic models that incorporate larger pore substrates and physiological shear stresses for extended periods of time, it…