I recently began working directly with Dr. Harold Smith’s A3G protein. In my previous posts,  I worked with BSA and IgG in order to develop a small-scale diffusion set-up able to reach equilibrium before it dries out. These preliminary steps…

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is one of the important growth factors/signaling factors that affect endothelial cells.  It is involved in angiogenesis, vessel regrowth during wound healing, vessel development and other vascular functions.  Since this is the most commonly studied…

In all of my experiments involving vacuoles, I’ve seeded at 50000 cells/cm2 which gets the cells to confluence after ~ 1 day of growth.  I’ve always seen vacuoles with these parameters.  For this experiment, I wanted to see what the…

A couple months ago, I tried to use tetramethylrhodamine (TAMRA) as a fluid-phase marker to label vacuoles.  The idea is that the only way this stain could be internalized is if it is pinocytosed, eventually ending up in vacuoles.  If…

It’s been a while since I’ve done long-term BBB co-culture experiments on transwells but I recently completed a study.  I was particularly interested to determine whether I could reproduce this spike in TEER that I measured in 1 previous experiment.…

Last time I cultured fibroblasts on pnc-Si transwells, the cells got super-confluent over the membrane and made the analysis difficult.  Basically, I wanted to see if fibroblasts formed vacuoles/2D structures over free-standing membranes.  I thought the multi-layer cells could have…

I’ve always suspected that the pore formation process was very quick and to confirm this I looked at a wafer that was annealed for 10 s vs. 60 s. From the distributions, it would appear that the majority of pores…

The goal here is to see if by using our membrane we can measure and separate different pore wall interaction effects of gas molecules passing through a pore. First, some theory. The flow through every pore of particular aspect ratio…

Here is an attempt at the active area figure using the “newer” EO membranes (SC172).  Here is the raw flow data for the three membrane sizes: If we take the slopes from this figure, we get the flow rates in…

Along with differently sized square membranes, I also designed a wafer with different sizes of slits.  On each chip, there is a 4000, 2000, 1000 and 500um long window.  The thicknesses of these windows are 200, 100, 50 and 25um. …