I did a small experiment to demonstrate that a carbonized membrane would be stable in a harsh alkaline solution, such as KOH. I soaked a carbonized membrane and untreated membrane in %5 KOH at 40 C for an hour in…

Inspired by some recent literature that I have been reading, I decided to add an argon bombardment step after the amorphous silicon deposition step by applying a 50 W substrate bias. The idea is that point defects on the surface…

The other (see below) just-to-be-sure experiment I performed this week was to compare staining between 2 different live cell dyes.  I typically use calcein AM to stain live cells green.  This is a membrane-permeant dye which, once inside cells, is…

I recently started up another BBB co-cultures and I had a couple of leftover samples.  I decided to use one for a ‘just-to-be-sure’ experiment since I realized that I never did a calcein-Hoechst 33342 co-stain.  That is, I never used…

In prep for manuscript writing I came across a paper that says they’ve created a super efficient EO pump that uses extremely low voltages.  Their top flow rate (.125 mL/(min V cm2) ) is comparable to the flow rates I…

I designed new masks with different sized squares and slits in order to study how the aspect ratio of free-standing membranes would affect endothelial cells.  In this 1st experiment, I seeded bEnd at 50000 cells/cm2 and let them grow for…

Some time before I noticed that placing the membrane in the metal deposition chamber at slight angle to the incoming metal atoms stream makes thin metal layer only on one side of the pore, shadowing the rest of it. Rotating…

My goal for this experiment was to see whether vacuoles form in primary cells.  If they did, this makes the case that the results with bEnd3 are more physiologically relevant since primary cells are better models of in vivo behavior. …

I wanted to confirm my results from this previous post.  Here, I used lower concentrations of bafilomycin (10, 25 and 50nM) in growth media.  Everything else was the same (except the cells were 1 passage older). The results are the…

All the data presented below was generated by Alex from Adarza Biosystems, Inc. Introduction: Chemical vapor deposition of 99% APTES (3-Aminopropyltriethoxysilane) on planar silicon chips was accomplished using the new vapor deposition system (YES: Yield Engineering Systems). In addition to…