Microfluidic chip with pillar arrays for controlled production and observation of lipid membrane nanotubes

Abstract

Microarray surface chemistry and design set the geometry of lipid membrane nanotubes easily formed and observed in a microfluidic chamber.

Bifurcations in flows of complex fluids around microfluidic cylinders

“…2(d) ], 46 generating lipid membrane nanotubes for the study of cellular processes [ Fig. 2(e) ], 47 and forming functional nanogel materials based on viscoelastic micelle solutions [ Fig. 2(f) ].…”

GTP and lipids control self-assembly and functional promiscuity of Dynamin2 molecular machinery

“…NT template formation. NTs were formed in a microfluidic chamber over SU8 micropillars, as described previously (Martinez Galvez et al, 2020). Alternatively, NTs were formed by GSB rolling over a supported lipid bilayer (SLB).…”

“…To assess the NT radii, we first performed a calibration of the Rh-DOPE fluorescence intensity per membrane area (ρ0). For the calibration, we used a lipid bilayer supported on a glass coverglass prepared as previously described (Dar et al, 2015;Martinez Galvez et al, 2020). Images were acquired with Nikon Eclipse Ti-E motorized inverted microscope equipped with a CoolLed pE-4000 light source, 100x/1.49 NA oil objective, and Andor Zyla sCMOS camera.…”

“…Image analysis was performed with ImageJ (Edelstein et al, 2010;Schindelin et al, 2012) and Origin software. NT radius was calculated as rNT = Fl/2πρ0, where Fl corresponds to the total Rh-DOPE fluorescence per NT length unit (Dar et al, 2015;Martinez Galvez et al, 2020).…”

Advances in Microtechnology for Improved Cytotoxicity Assessment

“…In the last decades, remarkable advancements have been made in the field of microtechnology to improve analytical processes in biology, through miniaturization, for biosensing DNA (Bulyk et al, 1999;Zhang et al, 2010) and protein arrays (He et al, 2008;Ramachandran et al, 2008;Lopez-Alonso et al, 2013;Gonzalez-Pujana et al, 2019), on-chip electrophoresis (Fritzsche et al, 2010;Ou, et al, 2019), microimmunoassays (Riahi et al, 2016;Hu et al, 2017), microfluidic cell sorting (Shields et al, 2015;Vaidyanathan et al, 2018) and for cellular membrane modelling (Hirano-Iwata et al, 2010;Strulson and Maurer, 2011;Galvez et al, 2020), among others (Beebe, et al, 2002;Sackmann, et al, 2014). In fact, microtechnology enables the precise control of the topography and the surface chemistry, leading to engineered platforms for the study of cellular processes or biosensing and, at the same time, bringing advantages such as time saving, reduced costs and working space, automation of the processes, increased sensitivity and reduced volumes of the required reagents (Wurm et al, 2010;Azuaje-Hualde et al, 2017).…”