-For this week, our group focused exclusively on testing of the prototype device with a .5% agarose gel that had no channel puncture through it. Specifically for the purposes of this experiment, we were looking to identify four things: 1. How would the gel loading procedure look like within the closed chamber device when the gel was loaded onto the filter paper surface via a pipet tip that fit into the top cap. 2. Would the filter paper hold the gel? 3. Would dye from the top of the gel diffuse through it and reach the bottom of the gel 4. Would the entire structure remain intact over a long period of time To examine these things, we prepared the gel and loaded it within the device. During the first run through, the filter paper was punctured by the channel creation process which led us to increase the length of the overlap in the final design. In a second run through, we were able to successfully ensure that the gel would remain in the top compartment and after waiting 10 mins for it to solidify, we loaded a dye via the drug injection port and came back the next day to check on it. We were able to see very good results and they are shown in the pictures attached below. For the next step, we have gone ahead with printing our final design using finer material and plan to create a channel that will have liquid being pumped through it for an extended period of time. Afterwards, we plan to load Rhodamine B to the top and see if we are able to collect any of that from the channel flow through. This signal can be read via a fluorometer. The attached pictures show the gel loading process, that the dye was able to diffuse uniformly from the top of the gel all the way to the very bottom, what it looks like while the experiment was run, and hat the gel remains confined to the top of the device (above the filter paper) for the whole time. -Arnold
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Group 38Archives
April 2017
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