Background: Similar to the Gaborski lab, the authors of the publication “Microfabrication of high-resolution porous membranes for cell culture” fabricated and characterized ultra-thin polymeric membranes for use as cell culture substrates. Upon reviewing their publication, Tom and I discussed some of…

This post is a followup to my previous post, which can be found here. When last I posted, I shared a handful of videos showing membranes transferred onto glass with water vapor being wetted in shear, and noted how the…

Jirachi has been working to make thin nafion films using our membranes as a support structure. Nafion is polymer that contains a sulfonate group, and as a result acts as a proton wire, allowing for cations (+) to be transported across a…

Hi all, a quick update in case you want to know what we are up too.   This summer it will be just me at the McGrath lab; the main goal is to produce some preliminary data with an eye…

Attached is a paper I’d like to review on Thursday (June 11, 2015). This group is using two planar surfaces in an attempt to mimic a 3D cell culture environment. This is similar to our claims that cells growing on…

Pertaining to the tenting work that Greg and I have been doing, some of the experiments discussed on my last post have given us reason to believe that the transferred membranes may not adhere well to silicon oxide, floating just…

I spent some time testing the various steps of the transfer and wetting process to see if I could find the cause of membrane delamination that I saw earlier. The result seems to be that time is the main culprit.…

My original post reported burst pressures on rectangular windows with the chips trench side down in the fixture (pressure from below). These values are low compared to square window pressures. My pressures ranged from 2 psi to 12 psi while square windows achieved…

My first attempt at a nanopore fabrication/DNA experiment in NPN assemblies was interesting but ultimately unsuccessful. As I said in our last meeting, I have been able to reproduce the membrane transfer process (using some steam between the two membranes…

Summary Since our last attempt, Greg and I have been attempting to refine our tenting experiments with the goal of demonstrating that we’re able to hydrate the volume underneath a nanoporous tent. This latest experiment is very similar to our…