Summary This post complements Fabricating 0.5 um Channels in Microscope Slides for Staph Invasion Assays. Challenges in the etch transfer process necessitated switching to a different substrate that had stronger selectivity. With that in mind, we set out to create 500×500 nm channels in silicon wafers for the bone invasion study. We had partial success (micron-sized…

Summary After success with the development and execution of the μSiM-CA (Canalicular Array; see Masters et al., Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology, and Medicine 2019), Jim wanted to develop a platform to answer some more biophysics focused questions. In order to facilitate these studies, the platform would ideally be configured to allow for live imaging of staph…

Introduction In an effort to move forward with a ‘lung microvasculature on a chip’ model, I have been experimenting with using primary human pulmonary microvascular endothelial cells in our devices. The cells (HPMECs) are purchased from Promocell and are collected from a single donor lung. Unfortunately I found little information on their use in recent…

Carrying our membrane functionalization work forward we attempted to work in both the polymer chemistry space and the KODE nonspecific binding space. With the results shown below the KODE molecule pathway has shown much more promise than the polymer chemistry pathway. This, for the moment, has provided the conclusions that fuel the title of this…

This is just a quick comparison of the new types of imaging that we now have available to us. As Bill mentioned previously, we have an Andor Dragonfly confocal system now available to us thanks to Patrick Oakes. We have been testing the system extensively and I have been messing around with it for imaging…

Microplastic contamination in drinking water is a contemporary problem that has captured the public eye, and we’re now seeing a growing demand for scientific examination of the issue. In response to this, we have recently been working on establishing a microplastics capture and analysis platform with silicon nanomembranes for environmental water samples. We started by…

Introduction We are aiming to make device assembly easy and quick, particularly for distribution to non-engineering laboratories. We are collaborating with ALine to develop assembly via pressure-sensitive adhesion techniques. Assembly Process Modular Device Assembly Animation2 We made ten devices with porous membranes and ten with non-porous membranes to show no leakage. Current Issues and Potential…

This is my draft presentation for my CMSR presentation on December 4th. Link

Summary: The fabrication of NPN relies on the formation of pnc-Si over a non-porous SiN film, then etching the pattern of the pnc-Si into the SiN. I used the same concept to replicate the dual-scale nanomembrane style (microporous+nanoporous) featured in Alec’s work, as well as create a porous/nonporous nanomembrane substrate, by using existing SiN or…

I would like to introduce Compressive Structured Illumination Microscope (CS-SIM), which will be built in the McGrath’s Lab. CS-SIM is a novel microscopy framework, which was proposed by me. It is dedicated to alleviate some SIM problems such as motion artifacts as well as photobleaching, and also it might present further resolution improvement thanks to…