Hi all, A while back I have posted about my attempt to culture bEnd3 (mouse brain endothelial cell) underflow, which failed to maintain bEnd3 proliferation and did not promote alignment under flow. As an alternative/control, I switch the cell types to HUVEC (human umbilical cord endothelial cells), which is known to do well under flow….
Continuing my work from last week, Tucker used the same tenting (NPN, vapor transfer) and incubation procedure (20 nm and 60 nm Au particles) on an oxide substrate with posts (200 nm high). The substrate was dessicated in the 70C oven overnight. No additional platinum or gold coatings were made. The sample was tilted slightly…
As seen in prior NRG post, ozone treated samples recover over about 24 hours. However, recent experiments at Gaborski Lab show high variability when using the Corona wand to treat samples with ozone. The goal of this experiment was to determine the contact angles of PDMS samples when exposed to ozone treatment. PDMS samples were…
Summary: I have some ok images (20x) of cells growing on MgF2. My controls still look poor. Something about the stain is causing the TCP + NPN controls to detach ahead of the MgF2 material, even if they aren’t fully dead yet. I used acetone fixation, which worked well for the materials on the nanomembrane, but…
To test the filtration capabilities of our tents, Tucker and I immersed a tented (wafer 1150, ~30 nm pores) oxide structure (~3 um hole diameter, 200 nm high) and a nontented structure in a solution containing 60 nm (.043 nM) and 10 nm (~10 uM) Au nanoparticles for 1 hour (2 uL incubation volume), rinsed them…
We’ve made a few academic inquiries so far into the theory which governs our nanoporous membrane transfer, but engineers as we are, the pace of our practical knowledge has outstripped that of our theoretical understanding. Here, I want to share a summary of what we know about these transferred membranes from a practical perspective, oriented…
Background: Similar to the Gaborski lab, the authors of the publication “Microfabrication of high-resolution porous membranes for cell culture” fabricated and characterized ultra-thin polymeric membranes for use as cell culture substrates. Upon reviewing their publication, Tom and I discussed some of the experiments that we’d like to replicate to further characterize the SiO2 membrane for our…
This post is a followup to my previous post, which can be found here. When last I posted, I shared a handful of videos showing membranes transferred onto glass with water vapor being wetted in shear, and noted how the wet-dry interface tended to rend them apart and/or drag them along them surface. I provided…
Jirachi has been working to make thin nafion films using our membranes as a support structure. Nafion is polymer that contains a sulfonate group, and as a result acts as a proton wire, allowing for cations (+) to be transported across a membrane, but not anions or electrons. Such a membrane can be used for filtering a…
Hi all, a quick update in case you want to know what we are up too. This summer it will be just me at the McGrath lab; the main goal is to produce some preliminary data with an eye on submitting an NSF grant in the fall. The topic is nano-biosensing, using Henry’s shear-free…