Author: Tucker Burgin

Now that I’ve got plenty of fluorescent protein, I’ve moved back to testing protein adsorption to various surfaces. I’ve repeated the n-Dodecyl β-D-Maltoside (“DDM”) coating procedure (reference) with the goal of preventing or heavily decreasing the protein adsorption to the PDMS surface. This time I had a total of four samples: DDM treated, sham treated, untreated,…

I made this post last week concerning testing this procedure to make sure that the resulting solution is in fact fluorescent BSA and not just a mixture of free BSA and free TRITC. Unfortunately, I exercised my right as a rookie to make silly mistakes and confused 5-TMRIA for 5-TRITC! The two particles are very similar…

IMPORTANT: I made a mistake, and mistook what was actually Tetramethylrhodamine-5-Iodoacetamide Dihydroidiode (5-TMRIA) for TRITC. 5-TMRIA is another Rhodamine derivative and has similar chemical properties to TRITC, but does not bind to proteins in the same way. The procedure should still work for conjugating TRITC with BSA (in fact, it should work even better,) but…

Today I performed a coating of n-Dodecyl β-D-Maltoside (“DDM”) on PDMS in an attempt to block protein adsorption (reference). The reference describes two different procedures, one in which the protein being incubated on the PDMS surface is in solution with DDM, and one in which the DDM coating is performed before the sample is washed…

I’ve taken fluorescence measurements with the fluorescence microscope on PEGylated and unPEGylated glass coverslips and SiN chips. Six coverslips and six chips were prepared. Samples were treated exactly the same, save for the fact that half the samples had PEG Silane in their treatment and half did not (though they were still bathed in toluene…

Last week I made a post about the troubles that a toluene-based PEGylation process presents to the PDMS in the CytoVu assembly. It was suggested that this issue might be overcome by replacing toluene with ethanol in the process, but I can report that unless I did something wrong (which is, I suppose, quite possible)…

This summer I’ll be working on preliminary development of technology that might lead to SiMPore drug discovery assays. The goal is to use SiMPore membranes to create much more efficient and generalized assays, which represents a big opportunity for the company. However, several challenges need to be addressed in order to make such a device…