We are putting the final touches on a submission to NIH based on our work with Vincent Tabard-Cossa in Ottawa. I want to provide everyone with a small overview. The basic premise is that solid nanopores (ssNPs) are the right tool for detecting low abundance biomarkers for personalized medicine and point-of-care diagnostics. This premise follows…
In our prior work we showed that endothelial cells form far fewer focal adhesions on microporous SiO2 membranes compared to non-porous SiO2 and tissue culture plastic (see prior post by Ana). We performed this analysis at 24 hours, which seems to be the standard in the literature. Interestingly, we found that the number of FAs…
Residual matrix from different separation techniques impacts exosome biological activity (PDF) Lucia Paolini, Andrea Zendrini, Giuseppe Di Noto, Sara Busatto, Elisabetta Lottini, Annalisa Radeghieri, Alessandra Dossi, Andrea Caneschi, Doris Ricotta & Paolo Bergese. Scientific Reports 6, Article number: 23550 (2016) doi:10.1038/srep23550 Abstract Exosomes are gaining a prominent role in research due to their intriguing biology and several…
Motivation and Background: Isolation of exosomes is a critical step for downstream diagnosis and therapeutic applications. Table 1 is a comparison table for four different protocols of exosomes isolation which have been designed to utilize physical properties of these vesicles. Protocol Concept Comments Ultracentrifugation High speed spins (100,000 ˟ g) to sediment exosomes The…
After years of on again/ off again work – dating all the way back to the earliest days of the NRG – we have finally submitted a manuscript on membrane mechanics. The story of this manuscript is a remarkable one: it was willed into existence by a UR Mechanical Engineering PhD student who developed a…
After several months of modeling, experimenting, thinking and rethinking, it’s finally time to talk about the conclusions we can draw about nanomembrane ECMO. These conclusions take into account only blood oxygenation, and not blood decarboxylation, which is a different therapy that I have not modeled. You can find my description of the model here, and…
Warning: the following post contains spoilers for Vincent’s talk at Rochester on Monday. Since the last update, I have tried to get the gold nanoparticles working properly, with no luck so far. The zeta potential we measured in KCl was 0mV, showing that even though we had visual confirmation that there were particle suspended in…
Two of my recent posts have dealt with my efforts to model ECMO and to experimentally validate this model. This post will describe the key change I made to my experimental system since my last post and describe my efforts to recreate the experimental results with my model — successfully! In an turn of extraordinary…
Overview of Experiment This experiment examined the behavior of the sieving coefficient graph under mixed particle size conditions, where one particle was significantly greater than the average pore diameter, and therefore acted as a “plug” for the larger pores. With fewer undesirably large pores to let through larger particle sizes, the sieving curve steepens and…
To image the blood side (in-channel) side of the membranes, I transferred the membranes of a HD chip onto another wafer segment (SiN wafer: 4534) The transfer wasn’t clean but I got some good images. These membranes were exposed to blood flow for 4 hours in a typical rat HD setup. Post experiment, the membranes…