Cells are frequently required to move in a local environment that physically restricts locomotion, such as during extravasation or metastatic invasion. In order to model these events, we have developed an assay in which vegetative Dictyostelium amoebae undergo chemotaxis under a layer of agarose toward a source of folic acid [Laevsky, G. and Knecht, D. A. (2001). Biotechniques 31, 1140-1149]. A...

BACKGROUND Inevitable loss of diagnostic material should be minimized during cell block preparation. We introduce a modified agarose cell block technique that enables the synthesis of compact cell blocks by using the entirety of a cell pellet without the loss of diagnostic material during cell block preparations. The feasibility of this technique is illustrated by high-throughput immunocytochem...

Optical microscopy of single bacteria growing on solid agarose support is a powerful method for studying the natural heterogeneity in growth and gene expression. While the material properties of agarose make it an excellent substrate for such studies, the sheer number of exponentially growing cells eventually overwhelms the agarose pad, which fundamentally limits the duration and the throughput...

This paper describes a technique for growing filamentous cells of Escherichia coli with defined shapes, including crescents, zigzags, sinusoids, and spirals. The procedure begins with the fabrication of embossed microchambers in agarose. Cells are trapped in the chambers by placing a flat, flexible "ceiling", either a slab of agarose or poly(dimethylsiloxane), against an agarose mold on which a...

INTRODUCTION Agarose gel has been commonly used for the cell culture of cartilage and soft tissue and also been used as phantom material for material property characterization using image techniques. The mechanical property of the agarose gel would therefore be important for such experiments and analyses. A fractional calculus approach had been proposed and applied as a method of describing the...

We have developed a novel method for efficient screening of affinity ligands (aptamers) from a complex single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) library by employing single molecule emulsion PCR based on agarose droplet microfluidic technology . Statistically diluted ssDNA of a pre-enriched library was encapsulated into individual uniform agarose droplets for highly efficient single molecule emulsion PCR to ...

Saccharophagus degradans is a potent degrader of marine and plant cell wall polysaccharides. In particular, it is capable of degrading and metabolizing agarose that is the main component of marine red algae. To understand its degradation and metabolism of agarose along with the agarase expression profile, S. degradans was grown using different carbon sources including galactose, agarose, glucos...

The purified and thermostable -amylase from soybean seeds was immobilized by entrapment on agarose and agar matrices and their catalytic properties were compared. The optimum pH of -amylase immobilized on both matrices was 7.0. The 1% of agarose (w/v) and 4% of agar (w/v) yielded an optimum immobilization of about 75 and 77% respectively. The K and V values as determined from the GraphPad m max...

We report a novel approach for producing carbon nanotube fibers (CNF) composed with the polysaccharide agarose. Current attempts to make CNF's require the use of a polymer or precipitating agent in the coagulating bath that may have negative effects in biomedical applications. We show that by taking advantage of the gelation properties of agarose one can substitute the bath with distilled water...