PolyHIPE, cell size

Similarly, it is possible to pump liquids through blocks of PolyHIPE, taking advantage of the fully interconnected microstructure. The rather large cell size of the material means that back pressures are relatively low. This is potentially of great importance in liquid chromatography, and will be discussed later. 

Figure 6.19 Electron micrograph of a polystyrene Polyhipe polymer, cell size typically...

The effect of pore size on cell concentration in the polyHIPE support at different times was determined from DNA analysis of the cell/polymer constructs. The results are shown in Figure 7.15 which indicates that DNA content per construct increases with increasing pore size. Since the pore size span in the experiments is not large (2.5-fold) the differences between the DNA contents are not as marked as the case for chondrocytes where the pore size span was 10-fold. Nevertheless, the present results also indicate that for a given cell type, an optimum pore size is present for cell proliferation as indicated by DNA content in... 

Figure 7,15 Effect of pore size on DNA concentration as a function of time in culture of rat osteoblast cells in hydroxyapatite-coated polyHIPE polymer support, illustrating the dependence of cell proliferation rate on support pore size...

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