Dental wear caused by tooth care is a complex phenomenon that depends on the quality of the tooth material, the type of toothbrush and the brushing slurry. Tooth wear is commonly determined in abrasion experiments using a standardized toothbrush in contact with a radioactively labeled dentin sample (RDA method). The increase of radioactivity in the slurry is a direct and highly-sensitive indica...

OBJECTIVE The lack of meaningful axon regeneration after central nervous system damage and poor functional recovery after serious peripheral nervous system nerve injuries have been long-standing problems of substantial interest to both neurosurgeons and neurobiologists. As an alternative to strategies that seek to promote the regeneration of adult axons, our research group has taken advantage o...

Thermomechanical Sensitivity of Microcantilevers in the Mid-Infrared Spectral Region B. Kwon a , C. Wang a , K. Park b , R. Bhargava c & W. P. King a a Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering , University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign , Urbana, Illinois b Department of Mechanical, Industrial and Systems Engineering , University of Rhode Island , Kingston, Rhode Island c Department of Bi...

In this contribution, I summarize some of the recent results within theory and simulation of microscale acoustofluidic systems that I have obtained in collaboration with my students and international colleagues. The main emphasis is on three dynamical effects induced by external ultrasound fields acting on aqueous solutions and particle suspensions: The acoustic radiation force acting on suspen...

Polarizable liquids respond to a non-uniform electric "eld by collecting preferentially in regions of maximum "eld intensity. This manifestation of dielectrophoresis (DEP) is a wellknown example of the ponderomotive force, with the "eld acting on individual (molecular) dipoles in the liquid. When electrode dimensions are scaled down to &10 to 100 m, liquid DEP makes possible a new type of high-...

The design and performance of an easily constructed cell for microscale spectroelectrochemical analysis is described. A cation exchange polymer film, Nafion, was used as a salt bridge to provide ionic contact between a small sample well containing a coiled wire working electrode and separate, larger wells housing reference and auxiliary electrodes. The cell was evaluated using aqueous ferri/fer...

We report a facile method to fabricate free-standing, 3D hydrogel microarchitectures of chemically sol-gel transitional hydrogels, which is based on the use of hydrophilic substrate and aerosol of gelling agent without molding (or sandwiching) process. Using proposed methods, we fabricated hydrogel microarchitectures of sheets, meshes, or microunits without morphological distortions on the micr...

Glycomics research requires the isolation of glycans from cells for structural characterization and functional studies of the glycans. A method for cell-based microscale isolation and quantification of highly sulfated, moderately sulfated, and nonsulfated glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) was developed using Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells. This microscale isolation relies on a mini-strong anion exch...

This paper reports a simple and direct method to fabricate mesoscopic hydrogel constructs for size controlled pseudo-islets with MIN6 cells, a pancreatic β-cell insulinoma, via lamination of free-standing mesh patterned cellular hydrogel. The MIN6-laden hydrogels with three different micro-patterns were simply fabricated, free-standing cultured, and functionally analyzed to examine the effect o...

Evaporation is a well known issue when handling small liquid volumes. Here we present a review of microscale assays prone to evaporation and methods to make them more robust. Applications for these assays span from combinatorial chemistry to cell-biology where the stability of concentrations and osmolarity can be critical. A dimensionless evaporation number Ev is presented and used to character...