Introduction Sphingosine-1-phosphate: production and endothelial cell signaling Sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) is a bioactive sphingolipid produced through the phosphorylation of sphingosine, a component of the plasma membrane, by SphK1/2. Many cells produce and store S1P, the largest source of which is platelets,…

Introduction EC Apicobasal polarity in immunity has and will continue to be a theme of my thesis. I have presented on bits and pieces of this work over the past year or so, but now that this work is under…

Since precision printing FITC KODE molecules into the windows of our 3 slot chips I have begun testing both the uniformity and the functionality of surface coatings of these molecules. In pursuit of coating uniformity I have tested several different…

This post serves as an introduction to the uni-axial motion envisioned to be integrated into the tendon-on-chip platform. As discussed previously we are working in junction with Dr. Awad from the Center for Musculoskeletal Research (CMSR) center at UR to…

Hey, this will be a rather short post, but kind of important for the current work on my 5637 EV capture. While working over the break, I was messing around with capturing CFSE labeled 5637 EVs and I noticed that…

Objective: Determine the minimum required area and number of exploratory cytoplasmic protrusions for sensing ECM alignment and causing cell polarization. Hypothesis: Cells only need to sense collagen alignment through exploratory protrusions extended during initial phases of cell seeding and not…

Summary This post complements Fabricating 0.5 um Channels in Microscope Slides for Staph Invasion Assays. Challenges in the etch transfer process necessitated switching to a different substrate that had stronger selectivity. With that in mind, we set out to create 500×500…

Summary After success with the development and execution of the μSiM-CA (Canalicular Array; see Masters et al., Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology, and Medicine 2019), Jim wanted to develop a platform to answer some more biophysics focused questions. In order to facilitate…

Introduction In an effort to move forward with a ‘lung microvasculature on a chip’ model, I have been experimenting with using primary human pulmonary microvascular endothelial cells in our devices. The cells (HPMECs) are purchased from Promocell and are collected…

Carrying our membrane functionalization work forward we attempted to work in both the polymer chemistry space and the KODE nonspecific binding space. With the results shown below the KODE molecule pathway has shown much more promise than the polymer chemistry…