Figure 5.

(a) and (b) Fluorescence microscopy images of adjacent cell mimic structures that share a common oxCNF membrane. Cell mimic (b) is permeable to 100 nm beads along its oxCNF membrane facing the bead feeding microchannel (feeding microchannel shown in c). However, the oxCNF barrier coupling cells (a) and (b) is not permeable to 100 nm beads. Thus, the number of defects of size <100 nm ± 13 nm is effectively zero along the 250 μm length of wall separating the two cell structures. Moreover, the left-most oxCNF membrane in cell (a) also appears impermeable to 100 nm beads as no beads are detected in cell (a). The experiment is a duplicate of that shown previously in figure 4, and again, pore 2 was found to be the only permeable pore along this length of oxCNF membrane.