As we make larger and larger pores, we see that they are becoming more convoluted and have stopped looking like circles or ellipse. In order to try describing these shapes, they were given a “roundness” number which was calculated by taking the minor axis and dividing it by the major axis. However this often fails…

I’ve made some modifications to my V2 design such that it allows total vertical access, among other things:   This design utilizes embedded electrodes and filter within gasket layers to create a tight fluidic seal for each channel. Here, the slot is pointed upward, so the endothelials will be on the bottom side and the…

In this experiment I use a syringe pump to move urea dissolved in ddH2O through a 10 mm long, 300 µm high, 500 µm wide dialysis channel. The retentate is collected in a fraction collector then measured using a urea assay from Abcam. Our first experiment on Urea clearance with BSA was performed with 0.5…

Found a Master’s thesis from RIT that details etch rates for ITO films in Hydrochloric Acid.   I originally attempted to do an etch using 1M HCl, but as the graph shows, this is not enough to produce an etch rate. I found this information out later, as 37% aqueous HCL = 12M solution, from http://openwetware.org/wiki/Hydrochloric_acid. Using…

In this post, I’ll mainly focus on the furnace annealing results of OSO stacks. The structure of the OSO stack is also 30-25-30, which corresponding to 25nm thick silicon layer and 30nm thick oxide layers. The annealing temperature ranges from 600C to 1000C with a 100C interval. Each sample was annealed for 30 minutes. The…

I recently bought some slides of ITO from Sigma-Aldrich, and have been working to integrate them into PDMS by using the same process as I did for the glass coverslips (seen here) The main differences between the glass coverslips and the ITO coated microscope slides are the ITO film, which seems to have different wetting…

The goal of the design is to design a system that can co-culture cells under varying flow conditions, measure TEER, and perform dynamic microscopy. Specifically, the endothelial tight junctions are the primary mechanism by which the BBB is regulated. It is thought that astrocytes and pericytes can influence this mechanism. With the completed system, we…

Hemocompatiblity of pncSi membranes was tested by checking for three main parameters: 1) Platelet adhesion, aggregation and activation studies 2) Complement protein activation studies 3) Assaying levels of thrombin generation All the studies and their assays were based on the paper by Fissell and Roy, who tested the same parameters on surface modified silicon wafers….