Historically, most microfluidic devices for genetic analysis have been fabricated in glass, a substrate that is costly and, if not regenerated properly between analyses, can have problems with cross-contamination. The use of polymeric substrates, such as poly(methylmethacrylate) (PMMA), allows for simplified fabrication with the possibility for inexpensive and disposable microdevices. The work ...

Microfluidic devices composed of glass capillaries were used for generation of double emulsion droplets with photocurable shell phase. The cores of the emulsion droplets were aqueous suspension of higly charged polystyrene (PS) particles which readily form the crystals by repulsive interparticle potential. The shells of double emulsion droplets were solidified downstream and formed the polymeri...

Recently, the ability of polymeric collagen-like peptides to regulate cell behavior has generated great interest. A triple-helical peptide known as collagen-related peptide (CRP) contains the sequence (Gly-Pro-Hyp)(10). With Gly-Pro-Cys triplets appended to both of its termini, designated CRP(cys), chemical cross-linking using heterobifunctional reagents generates CRP(cys)-XL, a potent, widely ...

Biofilms are surface-mounted, multicellular communities of microbes. Biofilms are often associated with chronic infections that resist treatment, evade the immune system, and damage host tissue. An essential characteristic of the biofilm state is that constituent organisms are bound in a polymeric matrix. This matrix gives the system spatial structure and clusters bacteria near each other, faci...

A novel micropattern-assisted nanoassembly (μPAN) method to organize highly ordered nanocolloidal arrays onto a nonfouling polymeric surface is reported. A high-density array of polyethylene glycol (PEG) hydrogel microwells is first fabricated on glass substrates with the minimal feature resolution of 1 μm using photolithography method. By simply controlling the colloidal concentration of the d...

A low-cost, direct fabrication technique with a micrometer range resolution has been implemented for rapid prototyping of optical masks for photolithography and structured light and diffraction optics applications. Using a setup based on the optical unit of a compact disc-digital versatile disc burner, a low-energy infrared laser beam was focused on a thin polymeric layer with embedded absorbin...

We present the self-dynamics of protein amino acids of hydrated lysozyme powder around the physiological temperature by means of molecular dynamics simulations. The self-intermediate scattering functions of the amino acid residue center of mass display a logarithmic decay over 3 decades of time, from 2 ps to 2 ns, followed by an exponential alpha relaxation. This kind of slow dynamics resembles...

A polarization-independent phase-only liquid crystal (LC) phase modulator using a double-layered structure is demonstrated. Two orthogonal LC layers are separated by two ultra-thin anisotropic polymer films. The anisotropic polymeric films not only separate the LC layers but also provide good molecular alignment. As a result, a polarization-independent phase modulator with 2pi phase shift is ac...

A machine learning strategy is presented for the rapid discovery of new polymeric materials satisfying multiple desirable properties. Of particular interest is the design of high refractive index polymers. Our in silico approach employs a series of quantitative structure–property relationship models that facilitate rapid virtual screening of polymers based on relevant properties such as the ref...

Natural-based composite’s progress as carriers has revealed many benefits in biomedicine, notably the construction field, synthetic biology, and genetic engineering. Compared to analogous composites without nanoparticles, incorporating nanoparticles into polymeric materials improved architectural performance, physiological connections, ecological features. The major goal of current investigatio...