Berlin 2018 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 15: Postersession III

BP 15.20: Poster

Tuesday, March 13, 2018, 14:00–16:00, Poster B

Cyclic Olefin Copolymer as an X-ray Compatible Material for Microfluidic Devices — •Manuela Denz, Gerrit Brehm, and Sarah Köster — Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Deutschland

Microfluidics is a well-established technique in biophysics, in particular in microscopy experiments. In recent years, microfluidic devices have also been combined with X-ray methods, taking advantage of the fact that with X-rays, smaller length scales can be probed than with visible light. For these applications, the choice of window material for the microfluidic chip is the key element. Therefore, a low background signal and high radiation resistance of the material are desired. Furthermore, reproducible and straightforward device fabrication is important for the establishment of such devices in the community. In this study, we present devices solely made out of cyclic olefin copolymer (COC). We fabricated the devices from two COC sheets with similar glass transition temperatures, so that no gluing or plasticization is necessary. In a comparative study with Kapton (polyimide) devices, a material widely used in relation with X-rays, we characterized the devices according to their suitability for our X-ray measurements and obtain data of equal quality. In a second step, we investigated the assembly process of weakly scattering vimentin intermediate filament proteins, which shows that the COC devices are very suitable for protein assembly studies and thereby open up a large variety of applications in biophysics.