We’ve been getting some strange cell morphologies recently in short-term adhesion studies.  My previous post on this subject links to a few of these results. Unfortunately, my last experiment into short-term cell morphologies on autoclaved and EtOH- sterilized samples wasn’t…

Some transwell cell culture models require 1 week or more of cell growth in order to let the cells fully differentiate and form mature monolayer barriers.  I had a couple of leftover samples a couple of weeks ago, so I…

Dave did a series of 20nm SiO2 film depositions at different temperatures (constant bias) and gave them to me to AFM.  I guess he wanted to see if film roughness changed drastically over the range of ‘room temp – 400C’…

Before Anant left for India, we were doing cell adhesion studies with pnc-Si transwells and getting some weird morphologies.  Check it out here, here, here, here, here. This is in contrast with the 2D studies that Anant did for the…

Earlier this week, Maryna and I did some AFM of her samples.  She vapor-deposited parylene on the well-side of pnc-Si and was interested in whether/how well that polymer got through the pores.  We got some really interesting-looking scans, but I’ll…

One of Christine’s projects was to determine if pinholes affected electrical resistance (TEER) measurements.  She summarized her work here.  I collected her data and did some negative controls to finish this work up.  Here’s the graph: The “no membranes” data…

Christine and I have been looking into whether the O-ring position affects transport through pnc-Si transwells.  The hypothesis was that the unstirred water layer under the Sepcon might be diminished by switching the O-ring from its normal position (“O-ring bottom”)…

Anant and I have been doing long-term discoloration experiments for the past few weeks.  We set up samples in “ideal” conditions – pnc-Si in transwells with pnc-Si side down, autoclaved samples and in the incubator (lower OH-).  The only non-ideal…

In my last post on HUVEC intercellular junctions, I just showed cadherin staining.  I repeated this protocol but also tried immunofluorescence for ZO-1, the tight junction protein. These are HUVEC P7, 6 days post-seeding @ 50,000 cells/cm2.  I looked at…

One of the markers of endothelial monolayer maturation/barrier function is the expression of adherens junction and tight junction proteins.  The adherens junction is composed of transmembrane proteins called cadherins (among other proteins) that link cadherins of neighboring cells to the…