The polymer that makes up the material is designed as a living polymer, with reactive terminal end-groups that bind to the freshly provided monomer upon damage to the microbeads.
Multicolor optical coding for biological assays has been achieved by embedding different-sized quantum dots into polymeric microbeads.
Monodisperse beads, also called microbeads, exhibit exact uniformity, and therefore all beads exhibit identical physical characteristics, including the binding capacity and the level of attraction to magnets.
To facilitate direct visualization of vascular deformation, tissue was labeled with fluorescent dextran and microbeads before viewing.
While nanoparticles are smaller than 1 micrometer in diameter (typically 5500 nanometers), the larger microbeads are 0.5500 micrometer in diameter.
The magnetic interaction is highly specific to the used superparamagnetic microbeads.
The coating of the microbeads contains also ligands to be able to attach the molecules of interest.
Fluorescent microbeads lodged throughout the tissue, providing discrete coordinates that aided in computerized calculations of strain and deformation.
