I have been having problems getting smoothed sheets of nanomembrane on my little oxide structures. I tried a number of different ways to delaminate the membrane, using tweezers to poke the membrane especially, but had little success getting smoothed sheets. I tried compressing the two chips together using the burst pressure clamp, then poking it…
I have lost many chips during my MgF2 or Au or Pt process due to yield problems with my RIE. I have wondered if the problem was due to power spikes. I have observed that my most poorly yielding etch runs usually have uneven power or power spikes during the run. Increasing window size (active area)…
Hi all, For the past one month I have been working on a height-based device for culturing bEnd3 (mouse brain endothelial cells) under flow. Ideally, this device is to constitute a blood brain barrier (BBB) mimetic. Device Full View (Front): The fluid flow is driven by hydrostatic pressure, created through the differences in the…
Cell Culture on the CO2 exchange Devices The system becomes more complicated with the addition of cells. Tejas Khire cultured HUVECS in a device that had an inverted design to the one pictured above. (The cells were plated on the top portion (well side) of the nanomembrane with media and the bottom (flat side)of the membrane was…
I have been trying to verify that my MgF2 material is cytocompatible (e.g. no different than tissue culture plastic), and attempted Live/Dead staining to confirm. The following images are from P6 HUVECs with Invitrogen L3224 Live/Dead stain on MgF2, NPN, and tissue culture plastic after ~96 hours. The devices were initially seeded at 5e5 cells/mL,…
Due to blog troubles yesterday, we have chosen to upload this post as a .pdf: Nanoporoustentwettingfluorescenceinconclusive
My recent work has focused on wetting the inner portion of an attocavity with isobaric cooling to create condensation. We are trying to attack the problem of wetting through the nanomembrane without breaking the membrane. A perfectly dry membrane will always rupture before the critical radius for wetting the backside of the membrane is achieved. To…
This blog is to revisit the old TEER data obtained by Barrett from the coculture experiments on pncSi and polymer membranes. The reason behind this analysis is to understand the differences of the raw resistance values obtained for the same cell type but on different membrane configurations. The data is shown below. As we can…
Summary and Instructional video The simplest way to get something wet is to allow water to condense on the surface of the something. In our case, we have a number of nanocavities (~ 0.1 femtoliters) with porous tents over them. The easiest thing to do is simply chill the substrates down to allow condensation to form….
I wrote about my experiences tenting nanomembranes here. I delaminated NPN material across a bunch of substrates and found that the film would actually form a nanocavity if spread across a sufficiently small surface (I estimated it to be 1-2 microns over a 50 nm height difference). Simpore fabricated a number of small substrates with varying…