UCT Silane Cited in Microfluidic Article
UCT has long been recognized for the support of research bio-pharmaceutical scientists working on micro-fluidics through its Specialty Chemical line producing the finest of silanes in the market place.It has been recently known that not only the presence of inhibitory molecules associated with myelin, but also the reduced growth capability of the axons limit mature central nervous system (CNS) axonal regeneration after injury. Conventional axon growth studies are typically conducted using multi-well cell culture plates that are very difficult to use for investigating localized effects of drugs and limited to low throughput. Unfortunately, there is currently no other in vitro tool that allows for the investigation of localized axonal responses to biomolecules for high-throughput screening of potential axonal growth drugs.
In a recent paper by Kim et al., based at Texas A&M University, USA (Micromachines (2016), 7, 114; doi:10.3390/mi7070114) used UCT’s tridecafluoro-1,1,2,2-tetrahydrooctyl trichlorosilane in their procedure to produce a microfluidic unit, this involved constructing a polydimethylsilane (PDMS) component: The final PDMS compartment layer was fabricated by the double PDMS soft lithography process from this PMMA master. First, a PDMS master was cast molded from the poly (methyl methacrylate master followed by 15 min of vapor coating using the UCT silane. In this article, the scientists developed a compartmentalized neuron culture platform enabling localized biomolecular treatments in parallel to axons that are physically and fluidically isolated from their neuronal somata. The 24 axon compartments in the developed platform were designed to perform four sets of six different localized biomolecular treatments simultaneously on a single device. In addition,the novel microfluidic configuration allows culture medium of 24 axon compartments to be replenished altogether by a single aspiration process, making high-throughput drug screening a reality. This article demonstrates why bio-pharmaceutical scientists engaged in cutting edge research turn to UCT Specialty Chemicals for premier silanes to produce the very finest results.
