User:Brian P. Josey/Notebook/2010/04/07

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Building up the Yoke
Now that all of the magnets came in, I am working on the actual yoke. My plan is to get a wood board that is 4" by 7", and around 1/2" thick, and round off the corners so that they each have a ninety degree curve that has a radius of an inch. This will allow it to fit inside the yoke giving it structure, and preventing the magnets from being reaching each other.

I talked to Dan about it, and gave him my plan for it. He said he would make it tonight, and have it in for us by tomorrow. On Friday, I should have the final yoke made, and I should be able to run the first experiments.


 * Steve Koch 00:52, 8 April 2010 (EDT): Great! Dan is spectacular.  So helpful of him that he's going to do it for you!

Microfluidic Blood Cleansing Device
I found a very interesting paper that had a very great idea, and one that I wish I had thought of before the authors did. It is by the Ingber group at Harvard. Essentially, they created a machine that will clean fungus out of whole human blood by using magnetic tweezers. You can get the paper either here or read the PopSci write up here.

The machine that they made is actually very simple. What they do is they mix whole human blood with opsonins and the fungus. These opsonins are magnetic nanobeads covered in anitbodies specific to the fungus. After the mixture is allowed to mix, it is flowed through one channel of a microfluidic cell, while saline solution is flowed through the other. When the two channels meet, they pass under an electromagnet that pulls the opsonins and the fungi that they are attached to out of the blood, and into the saline. In the end, they were able to remove 80% of the fungus out of the solution at a rate of 10mL in 30 min. While this might be slow for a human, which on average has 5 liters, it is still a very great idea, and one that potentially could lead somewhere.

I compared their tweezers with ours and there are some difference and similarities. For both of us the tweezers have two parts, the source of the magnetic field, and a concentrator. Their tweezers used a wrap of copper wire as the source of the field, and a special top that concentrated the field along the length of the flow cells. Ours uses neodymium magnets as the source, and the cone to concentrate the field a specific point. There are also differences: their tweezers has a much smaller gap, 5.7mm and ours use a more intense field. I can see why they would want to use a smaller gap.


 * Steve Koch 00:52, 8 April 2010 (EDT): Very cool! One of the many cool things I noticed about your design is that you allowed for making the gap smaller.  That was a very good idea on your part.  You're right-on in thinking that the gap size is another key, along with how close to the tip you can put the sample.  Sooooo, what do you think?  Will you be able to move the ferritin?  Also:  Make sure to take some photos of your construction, etc.!


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