User:Andy Maloney/Notebook/Lab Notebook of Andy Maloney/2009/08/17/Surface passivation
Another attempt
Today Ant and I decided to look at the spin coating of lipids on a glass slide again. We would have used my Spin coater 3000, except for the fact that it doesn't work all that well. It's to be expected since it is a first iteration of the design. I will have to look at it some time later to make it work for us.
Despite the fact that my coater doesn't work, we moved forward. We found that we could bypass the safety features on our crappy Fisher table top centrifuge which allowed us to operate it with the lid open. We figured out a way to hold a square cover slip in the center of the bucket and spin coated some lipids on the slip. We used 1 mg/mL lipids in chloroform and after spin coating, we added some fluorescent microspheres to the slide.
I made a composite image of a DIC picture taken of the lipid coating and a fluorescent image of the beads. I then false colored the images and combined them to get the below image. All image manipulation was done with ImageJ.
As you can see there are still problems with the coating of the slip but, we are on the right track.
More images
This one is kind of cool. It shows what we now think is a corral with 2 microspheres in it and a lipid coating surrounding. We have no way of gauging the thickness of the lipid layer right now.
SJK 16:21, 18 August 2009 (EDT)
The impression of all of us was the darker spot is bare glass, whereas the corral is lipid-bottomed. We were able to "heal" the putative bare glass parts completely via illumination with arc lamp excitation.
Another image
