Hello everyone! this post describes how we are going about determining the size cut-off of the membranes we make through nanosphere lithography. These are 120 nm thick silicon nitride membranes with controlled pore size between 320 and 80 nm. A polymeric scaffold is placed on them to increase robustness. The scaffold is a square grid…
As part of my thesis (and a tie-in to the microplastics research our lab has been conducting) I’ve been working on creating a measure of membrane capacity. A robust way to do this involves using microporous chips and polystyrene beads. Previous experiments on 8 micron slit membranes have shown that phosphate buffered saline (PBS) and…
This post is dedicated to our ongoing collaboration with Dr. Marchi at Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in France. The basic concept of the project is simple (Fig.1) and involves attaching a microporous membrane on top a 3D printed “drawer”, seeding endothelial cells on top to confluency, seeding epithelial cells on the bottom…
As part of Aim 1 of my PhD, I am looking into mechanical characterization of ultrathin membranes to explore the effects of porosity on the structural integrity and determine how porous we can go with a porous membrane, and last but not least, to quantify the mechanical robustness of Parylene membranes. Recently, the BME department…
Last time this project was discussed at NRG, Henry was the project lead (we miss you, Henry). He was observing bladder epithelial cell (BdEC) invasion and migration in co-culture with T24 bladder cancer cells. Here are links to his previous posts. https://trace-bmps.org/bdec-t24-co-culture-wound-healing/ https://trace-bmps.org/bdec-t24-co-culture-invasion-assay-preliminary/ We have transitioned away from the invasion assay and moved towards transwell…
Hi All, This post is more of a dump of figures that I have put together for Dan’s and my upcoming Journal of Membrane Science manuscript. I have included figures and captions, so any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Introduction Etaluma is a company that builds high resolution microscopes in a compact format for integration into cell culture incubators. This shifts from the traditional stage top or incubator cage approach to live cell imaging to allow for steady time-lapse imaging over extended periods of time without issues of focus or worries of temperature or…
Introduction Currently, no FDA approved drug exist for the treatment of sepsis. Past sepsis pharmaceuticals attempted to target mediators of the innate immune response. These drugs, however, struggled to balance remedial immune suppression from complete immune knockdown in a patient population plagued my a maladative immune system. This fundamental issues is due in part to…
This initial aim of this project was to obtain “pockets” with sub-100nm pores, while the top opening is much larger. Dr. Carter is the mastermind behind this project. The following simple fabrication process diagram explains the current approach. After initial failed experiments for obtaining very small openings, Marcela and I aimed for larger bead sizes…
Thanks to Ian Krout for the data. As covered in our last post, we hope to distinguish between different kinds of microdebris caught on silicon nanomembranes through the material’s different melting points. Plastics can have a wide range of melting points, depending on the ratio of plasticizers and backbone that compose the material. The additional…