Introduction: Kidney failure, also called ESRD, is the last stage of chronic kidney disease (CKD) where kidneys function below 10 to 15 percent of their normal levels. In the United States, there are over 660,000 ESRD patients from all ages, genders, and backgrounds. ESRD causes reduced urination in the body and subsequently, waste products and…

Recently we were interested in finding out how many particles from our immobilized graphene oxide (GO) nanolaminates are delaminated into suspension due to shear stress. We wanted to compare this concentration to those found in our previous hemolysis studies to determine if the delaminated particles would lyse red blood cells. In order to determine this,…

Introduction Over the past year, our lab has been working in close collaboration with the Schwarz lab to design, develop, and manufacture microfluidic transwells for their P50 project. The project was initiated after the discovery of S. aureus migration through sub-micron canaliculi in vivo. To further explore the genes involved in this newly proposed mechanism of immune…

From the last post, I had successfully manufactured waveguide on top of our porous silicon nanomembrane chip. However, the proof that light can transmit through the waveguide was not accomplished until last week. The problems I was experiencing included insufficient thickness and wrong cladding layer refractive index. Thus, in order to prove that my waveguide…

Hello Everyone, So Shannon and i have been working on studying the effect of exosomes in different conditions for wound healing assays and random migrations. This post is about one of our experiments (wound healing) to give you an update on our data and what we’re able to get with Henry’s matlab code. How the…

In this edition of the particle capture saga (this will eventually be an epic like Gilgamesh or Beowulf, we will start telling this tale by the fire and eventually thousands of years from now scholars will look back on this work and deem it a huge impact in the history of human evolution), I have…

Introduction: Over the past few weeks I’ve begun working on a project that deals specifically with characterizing tangential flow filtration with our labs ultra-thin membranes. Essentially, I’m working on understanding the advantages our membranes have over conventional/thicker ones by looking at characteristics such as transmembrane pressure, fouling, and flux. Our working hypothesis is that our…

Hello Everyone, I’ve been working on exosome labelling and trying to characterize it by NTA. So we read a paper published a month ago, explaining the presence of PKH nanoparticles as false positive results in internalization studies. They studied four different staining protocols and showed the presence of these nanoparticles regardless of the staining protocol….

Previously, we showed that our method of pll-peg coating is effective for creating non-fouling substrate which can prevent protein adsorbtion, and this method can be used to create a non-fouling pattern on the surface. In the next step, we wanted to make sure that whether our peg coating is effective for preventing cell adhesion or…

In this article we’ll share some of our preliminary results regarding the parameters of the NPN device. We will also be making some recommendations for further tuning of the design to specific tasks. We will be comparing one of the more recent batches to the one used in the Nano Letters paper. Note that for…