NRG

Over the last week, I’ve run a discoloration assay similar to one run a while back (Barrett’s post here). It was demonstrated in a subsequent paper (Agrawal2010) that annealing the pnc-Si films prevents discoloration of the membrane, which he tied to the nanomembrane remaining intact. I was given a few chips from the recent TEOS lot,…

When the HUVECs were first brought up, the first test for me to perform was to see how they reacted to CMFDA and repeated fluorescent excitations.  Based on the implications from previous research (summarized here), there is the possibility of harm or phototoxicity from the dye.  Since HUVECs are more valuable and ‘fragile’ than either…

On June 10th, 11th, and 12th I was in Boise, ID for the North American Membrane Society (NAMS) annual meeting. While there, I presented Jess’s work on the EO pump in a poster session. I got the chance to meet Andrew Zydney of Penn State, Peter Pintauro of Vanderbilt, and hang out with our Clarkson collaborators Ruth Baltus and…

Hi all, During last NRG meeting some questions are raised on what is the transmembrane pressure in Dean’s chip-in-a-beaker dialysis system and what is the direction of flow of the whole system. i gave them some thought and proposed the following scenario. Please feel free to correct me should I made any mistake.  i am simply throwing…

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)…

Invitrogen offers a number of stains and dyes for use in tracking cells and fluorescent imaging of tissue culture.  One prevalent live stain is called CMFDA (5-Chloromethylfluorescein Diacetate), a green fluorescent molecular probe.  This stain is utilized for tracking cells and monitoring growth & viability of the cells. While performing studies using CMFDA, there appears…

We have had success cross-linking PEG to TEOS membranes pretreated with TPM to aid in adhesion. This was done first on nonporous membranes, and then porous. We used 50% PEG at 1.5% cross-linker, which cross-linked at 8000ms. For comparison, 100% PEG at 3% cross-linker cross-linked at 5500ms. Nonporous TEOS Bottom image is at 4x. The…

  I have been looking into PLA (Poly Lactic Acid) plastic for use in our microfluidics. PLA is a commonly used material in 3-d printers, so it would be great if we could print out our microchannels for cell-culture devices. To that end, I wanted to see if the PLA plastic would react with our…

We used 4″ wafers with 40 nm pnc-Si on 50 nm RV SiN (RTP 1050 C, 100 C/s, 60 s). JP ran a series of RIE times from 10 to 50 s with 10 s intervals.  (We had initially planned on starting at 70 s based on experiments with 6 ” wafers, but fortunately JP chose…