Many, many thanks to Kilean Lucas and Brian McIntyre who enabled our metrology. We have desired to get 3d information about the structure of our nanopores. One method to do so is known as electron tomography, a technique which can reconstruct volumes and surfaces from sets of tilted images. By identifying dense regions of contrast…

Two weeks ago (as of the time of writing this post), I wrote a post on a dead end filtration experiment that I ran in order to demonstrate particle capture in pores, modeling a simple, purified exosome capture system that we could use for imaging or analysis. However, when I ran that experiment, I done…

-Intro The mechanobiology behind endothelial cells has been extensively studied in recent years. Shear stress as well as substrate stiffness have both been shown to influence endothelial cell signaling and morphology in vitro [1,2]. However, the combination effect of both shear stress and substrate stiffness on endothelial cell function has not been elucidated to date. Reinhart-King et…

This is the second in my series of posts that will be on my model exosome system. As I am trying to define the appropriate conditions for separating exosomes from blood and other fluids, I am first going through and trying to isolate each important parameter and see how they affect the capture of these…

In trying to determine the best conditions for capturing exosomes, one of the important questions that we have is what produces the case where exosomes are caught directly in the pores, not on top, but flush with the surface. This should be the size where the particles are almost exactly the size of the pores,…

As the title states, I partially etched some different material (Wafer 2238, 100 nm NPN) to create nanofeatures with blown out holes. With a thicker membrane, we can blow out the pores more (etch longer) without compromising the strength of the material (with regard to templating purposes). These membranes were fractured and coated with 6…

Matlab Generated Endothelial Cell Alignment Distribution Top and Bottom Gel No Gel Bottom Gel Run 1 Run 2 Statistical Analysis The next step in this data analysis is to perform some form of statistical analysis. Comparing real alignment data to a set of randomly generated alignments may be a good place to start. Also, comparing the frequency…

This post is a continuation of the work in Partial Etch RIE Blows out NPN Pores and MgF2 Nanomembrane Fabrication on partially etched NPN substrates. We believe the underlying NPN template influences the shape of our SERS active nanostructures and therefore the SERS properties. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the structures resulting…

[17-01-13] Committee Meeting

This post is a brief update on the previous post of HUVEC migration on 0.5 μm porous substrates.   Brief Recap We compared cell migration on nonporous (np), 0.5 μm low porosity, and 0.5 μm high porosity SiO2 membranes. Low and high porosity refer to a center-to-center distance of two or three pore diameters, respectively. For…