Low cost in vitro tools are needed at the screening stage of assessment of bioaccumulation potential of new and existing chemicals because the number of chemical substances that needs to be tested highly exceeds the capacity of in vivo bioconcentration tests. Thus, the parallel artificial membrane permeability assay (PAMPA) system was modified to predict passive uptake/ elimination rate in fish...

High sensitive flexible and wearable devices which can detect delicate touches have attracted considerable attentions from researchers for various promising applications. This research was aimed at enhancing the sensitivity of a MWCNT/PDMS piezoresistive tactile sensor through modification of its surface texture in the form of micropillars on MWCNT/PDMS film and subsequent low energy Ar⁺ ion be...

The posterior dorsomedial striatum (pDMS) is essential for the acquisition and expression of the specific response-outcome (R-O) associations that underlie goal-directed action. Here we examined the role of a pathway linking the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and pDMS in such goal-directed learning. In Experiment 1, rats received unilateral lesions of the BLA and were implanted with cannula targeti...

The patch clamp method measures membrane currents at very high resolution when a high-resistance 'gigaseal' is established between the glass microelectrode and the cell membrane (Pflugers Arch. 391 (1981) 85; Neuron 8 (1992) 605). Here we describe the first use of the silicone elastomer, poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS), for patch clamp electrodes. PDMS is an attractive material for patch clamp re...

Joule heating is a significant problem in electrokinetically driven microfluidic chips, particularly polymeric systems where low thermal conductivities amplify the difficulty in rejecting this internally generated heat. In this work, a combined experimental (using a microscale thermometry technique) and numerical (using a 3D "whole-chip" finite element model) approach is used to examine Joule h...

Stretchable devices with good transparency offer exciting new applications over the existing technologies, but remarkable difficulties remain in the fabrication of transparent and stretchable devices. In this paper, we report an effective method to fabricate transparent elastic photodetectors which combines the merits of the transparent polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) polymer with its stretchabilit...

In native conditions, cardiac cells must continuously comply with diverse stimuli necessitating a perpetual adaptation. Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is commonly used in cell culture to study cellular response to changes in the mechanical environment. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of using PDMS substrates on the properties of spontaneous activity of cardiomyocyte monolayer cult...

Quantifying naturally occurring strains in soft materials, such as those of the human body, requires strain gauges with equal or greater mechanical compliance. This manuscript reports materials and mechanics approaches are reported for an all-elastomer strain measurement device with gauge factor as high as 29 and with Young’s modulus that approaches that of the human epidermis. These systems us...

INTRODUCTION Microfluidics systems usually consist of materials like PMMA--poly(methyl methacrylate) and PDMS--poly(dimethylsiloxane) and not polystyrene (PS), which is usually used for cell culture. Cellular and molecular responses in cells grown on PS are well characterized due to decades of accumulated research. In contrast, the experience base is limited for materials used in microfludics c...

In this study, we explore the potential of Poly-DiMethylSiloxane (PDMS)-based phase shift lithography (PPSL) for the fabrication of nanofluidic devices. We establish that this technology, which was already shown to allow for the generation of 100 nm linear or punctual features over cm surfaces with conventional photolithography systems, is readily adequate to produce some of the most popular na...