Engineering Commons^™

Multi-Scale Characterization And Engineering Of Taxus Suspension Cultures, Sarah A. Wilson

Doctoral Dissertations

Plants produce a diversity of natural products that have commercial applications as flavorings, fragrances, pesticides and pharmaceuticals. These compounds are often the result of specialized metabolic pathways that are unique to plant systems, and have complex structures that make chemical synthesis routes infeasible. This necessitates exploitation of biological production routes. This thesis work presents a multi-scale characterization and engineering approach to understand and manipulate plant cell cultures on the extracellular (culture) and intracellular (metabolic pathway) levels. Studies focus on the commercially relevant suspension culture system Taxus, a medicinal plant species used for production of the FDA-approved anticancer drug paclitaxel. …

Mimicking The Arterial Microenvironment With Peg-Pc To Investigate The Roles Of Physicochemical Stimuli In Smc Phenotype And Behavior, William G. Herrick

Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation was to parse the roles of physical, mechanical and chemical cues in the phenotype plasticity of smooth muscle cells (SMCs) in atherosclerosis. We first developed and characterized a novel synthetic hydrogel with desirable traits for studying mechanotransduction in vitro. This hydrogel, PEG-PC, is a co-polymer of poly(ethylene glycol) and phosphorylcholine with an incredible range of Young’s moduli (~1 kPa - 9 MPa) that enables reproduction of nearly any tissue stiffness, exceptional optical and anti-fouling properties, and support for covalent attachment of extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins. To our knowledge, this combination of mechanical range, low …

Where To Buy Materials For The Activities, Morton Sternheim

Nanotechnology Teacher Summer Institutes

Sources for some of the less common materials used in the activities.

Seeing At The Nanoscale: New Microscopies For The Life Sciences, Jennifer Ross

Nanotechnology Teacher Summer Institutes

Visualizing single modules with fluorescence microscopy

Ozone, Uv, And Nanoparticles, Morton Sternheim, Jennifer Welborn

Nanotechnology Teacher Summer Institutes

•Ultraviolet light causes skin damage and cancer •Ozone in the stratosphere blocks UV •Sunscreen blocks UV, partly •Nanoparticles in sunscreen improve blocking Sunscreen PowerPoint and activities based on NanoSense web site:

http://nanosense.sri.com/activities/clearsunscreen/index.html

Self Assembly, Mark Tuominem, Jennifer Welborn, Rob Snyder

Nanotechnology Teacher Summer Institutes

No abstract provided.

Nanomedicine, Mark Tuominen

Nanotechnology Teacher Summer Institutes

An overview of nanomedicine. The end goal of nanomedicine is improved diagnostics, treatment and prevention of disease. Nanotechnology holds key to a number of recent and future breakthroughs in medicine.

Smooth Muscle Stiffness Sensitivity Is Driven By Soluble And Insoluble Ecm Chemistry, William G. Herrick, Shruti Rattan, Thuy V. Nguyen, Michael S. Grunwald, Christopher W. Barney, Alfred J. Crosby, Shelly Peyton

Chemical Engineering Faculty Publication Series

Smooth muscle cell (SMC) invasion into plaques and subsequent proliferation is a major factor in the progression of atherosclerosis. During disease progression, SMCs experience major changes in their microenvironment, such as what integrin-binding sites are exposed, the portfolio of soluble factors available, and the elasticity and modulus of the surrounding vessel wall. We have developed a hydrogel biomaterial platform to examine the combined effect of these changes on SMC phenotype. We were particularly interested in how the chemical microenvironment affected the ability of SMCs to sense and respond to modulus. To our surprise, we observed that integrin binding and soluble …