Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Leveraging Cell-Substrate Adhesion And Cell Migratory Properties In Skeletal Muscle Constructs And Cancer Metastasis Assays, Lauren E. Mehanna

Theses and Dissertations--Chemical and Materials Engineering

Volumetric muscle loss (VML) remains one of the few skeletal muscle injuries without a reliable and repeatable treatment. In large volume muscle injuries, muscle fibers as well as the surrounding connective tissue are damaged, preventing therapeutic muscle stem cells, called myogenic progenitor cells (MPCs), from reaching the injury site and initiating repair. There is a clinical need to rapidly fabricate in vitro muscle tissue constructs that mimic the native tissue organization, with aligned myotubes, for insertion and integration at the patient’s injury site. In this dissertation, we utilize the MPC’s natural propensity to close gaps across an injury site to …

A 3d Simulation Of Leukocyte Adhesion In Blood Flow, Tai-Hsien Wu

Dissertations

It has been widely acknowledged that further understanding about the dynamics between blood cells and blood flow can help us gain more knowledge about the causes of diseases and discover more effective treatments. Examples of such dynamics include red blood cell (RBC, or erythrocyte) aggregation, white blood cell (WBC, or leukocyte) margination, and WBC extravasation. WBC extravasation is an important multiple-step process in the inflammatory response and therefore has drawn considerable attention over the past two decades. In this multiple-step process, a WBC undergoes at least four steps, including capture, rolling, firm adhesion, and transmigration, and each step is influenced …

Fabricating Cost-Effective Nanostructures For Biomedical Applications, Erden Ertorer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis we described inexpensive alternatives to fabricate nanostructures on planar substrates and provided example applications to discuss the efficiency of fabricated nanostructures.

The first method we described is forming large area systematically changing multi-shape nanoscale structures on a chip by laser interference lithography. We analyzed the fabricated structures at different substrate positions with respect to exposure time, exposure angle and associated light intensity profile. We presented experimental details related to the fabrication of symmetric and biaxial periodic nanostructures on photoresist, silicon surfaces, and ion-milled glass substrates. Behavior of osteoblasts and osteoclasts on the nanostructures was investigated. These results …

Gene Synthesis, Cloning, Expression, Purification And Biophysical Characterization Of The C2 Domain Of Human Tensin, Kiran Sukumar Gajula

Doctoral Dissertations

Tensin is a large "docking" protein found in the adhesive junctions of animal cells and recruited early in the development of cell-substrate contacts. There it binds to the cytoplasmic domain of integrin β1 and caps the barbed ends of filamentous actin. This forms a rational basis for its implication in a direct role in the mechanics of membrane-cytoskeleton interactions. Tensin provides a physical link between the actin cytoskeleton, integrins, and other proteins at the cell-substrate contacts. Its overall biochemical properties are a function of its domain composition and architecture, i.e., the domains that are present and their relative positions in …

Determination Of The Mechanical Properties Of Electrospun Gelatin Based On Polymer Concentration And Fiber Alignment, Leander Taylor Iii

Theses and Dissertations

The process of electrospinning has given the field of tissue engineering insight into many aspects of tissue engineered scaffolds, including how factors such as fiber diameter and porosity are affected by polymer concentration. However, the affects of fiber alignment upon the material properties of electrospun scaffolds remains unclear. The purpose of this study is to determine how the material properties of electrospun gelatin scaffolds are affected by changes in fiber alignment and starting gelatin concentration. Gelatin scaffolds, with starting concentrations of 80, 100, and 130mg/m1, were electrospun onto a target mandrel rotating at various speeds. Samples of each scaffold were …

Image Enhancement And Analysis Of Leukocyte Adhesion, Yee-Ruh Lin

Theses

The image of leukocyte adhesion to microvascular walls in the isolated rat perfused heart model has been observed and processed. Some of the fluorescent labeled leukocytes are barely visible due to microscope focal plane and the motion of objects. The purpose of this thesis is to extract leukocyte from the image of the experimental data using image enhancement and analysis (segmentation) techniques and develop a program to handle automatically counting of leukocytes in a predefined scene.