Plasmachemical surface modification of porous polystyrene beads with allylamine or diaminopropane provides reactive amine functionality exclusively at accessible surface sites, allowing faster reactions than classically prepared materials.

Hollow nanoshells of layered double hydroxide (LDH) have been fabricated using exfoliated LDH nanosheets as a shell building block and polystyrene beads as a sacrificial template.

In an optical tweezers experiment intense laser light is tightly focused to intensities of MW/cm(2) in order to apply forces to submicron particles or to measure mechanical properties of macromolecules. It is important to quantify potentially harmful or misleading heating effects due to the high light intensities in biophysical experiments. We present a model that incorporates the geometry of t...

The use of chemicals or bio-larvicides for the control of Culex quinquefasciatus and Anopheles stephensi breeding in pit latrines and overhead tanks (OHT) respectively is discouraged owing to many undesirable impacts in the environment. Due to faecal contamination and poor survival, use of predatory fish in OHTs is not feasible. The use of expanded polystyrene (EPS) beads is a potential alterna...

Alternative, non-electrochemistry-based technologies for continuous glucose monitoring are needed for eventual use in diabetes mellitus. As part of a programme investigating fluorescent glucose sensors, we have developed fibre-optic biosensors using glucose/galactose binding protein (GBP) labelled with the environmentally sensitive fluorophore, Badan. GBP-Badan was attached via an oligohistidin...

CdSe quantum dots with polymerisable ligands have been incorporated into polystyrene beads, via a suspension polymerisation reaction, as a first step towards the optical encoding of solid supports for application in solid phase organic chemistry.

When a tank is subjected to vertical forced excitation, Faraday waves appear at the surface of liquid contains. In this paper, we consider effect layers polystyrene beads placed on isopropanol undergoing low frequency sinusoidal excitation. Beads remove most low-frequency resonances and reduce amplitude for remaining ones. The formation with observed come from small gaps in bead layers. A suffi...

Rhodamine B isothiocyanate (RhBITC) is a prototype dye molecule that is widely used as a fluorescent tag in a variety of biological applications. We report in this work that once RhBITC is adsorbed onto Ag on silica or polystyrene beads, it exhibits not only a strong surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) signal but also a measurable amount of fluorescence. The RhBITC-modified Ag-deposited si...

Using polystyrene microspheres coated with heparin or heparan sulfate, it was shown that coated microspheres specifically bound eukaryotic cells and were endocytosed by nonprofessional phagocytic cells. Coated microspheres displayed properties of binding to eukaryotic cells that were similar to those of chlamydiae, and the microspheres were competitively inhibited by chlamydial organisms. Endoc...

In this study, we present the methods of the particle separation by employing electrokinetic phenomena (dielectrophoresis (DEP) and traveling-wave electroosmosis (TWEO)) and the inclined gravity. The methods can separate particles of same sign DEP. However, it is very difficult to separate particles on a plane electrode. To cope with this problem, we create the “Bottle neck Fork-trace electrode...