User:Andy Maloney/Notebook/Lab Notebook of Andy Maloney/2009/06/02/Molecular Shuttles Operating Undercover: A New Photolithographic Approach for the Fabrication of Structured Surfaces Supporting Directed Motility

Disclaimer
These are my thoughts on this paper. Use them at your own risk and read the paper yourself!

Paper
Molecular Shuttles Operating Undercover: A New Photolithographic Approach for the Fabrication of Structured Surfaces Supporting Directed Motility

Review

 * Goal - To make channels for microtubules to glide along. They use what is called a guiding channel for their studies.
 * They note the persistence length of microtubules as 5.2 mm. Reference
 * They note that steep walls are required for guiding microtubules effectively.
 * These guys also use an undercut channel to prevent microtubules from getting out of the channel.
 * They go over the photoresist process. I think it is a good step by step guide but I am way too unfamiliar to understand this process. I'll ask one of my buddies at CHTM if this makes any sense to them.
 * Ha! They make is seem like the undercut profiles from the photoresist is a happy side effect for making microtubule roads.
 * Thanks Koch for describing what the Ni-NTA columns are today! I just read about them in this article.
 * They note using a detergent for one procedure that didn't make any difference in their results. So, they 86-ed the detergent.
 * So the photoresist they used is called AZ5214 which is highly autofluorescent. This necessitated they use Oregon green labeled microtubules.
 * Apparently microtubules cannot climb stacks higher than 300 µm.
 * Question: Why is this the case? Could it be because of the forces needed to make a microtubule bend that much? The other paper I read just talked about this...Hmmm...
 * Persistence length = 5.2 mm (unreferenced).

Take home

 * This is super cool! Well written and concise.
 * We can make or ask for the arrays since this is Bachand. Making them requires us asking Brueck if he is up for it but I think that this may be something we could investigate easily. Plus, if we had microtubules moving along roads, Larry would have an easy job tracking them.
 * The most important thing for me from this article is that we should try this assay of making microtubule roads. If not for the sake of tracking then for the sake of making the roads themselves. Since we are ultimately looking at how osmolytes affect kinesin motility, Why not use the tracks as a way to increase osmolytes near kinesin. Or, why not use a denser solution that will sink to the tracks. Just ideas...probably bad ones since I'm a bit tired.