Fig 4. Human ghost erythrocyte membrane engineering with NHS-pDMAA-Cy3 polymers.

Human erythrocyte ghosts can be surface modified with NHS-pDMAA-Cy3 and exhibit short-term retention of polymer. Ghost membranes were produced from intact hRBCs using hypotonic methods. Human RBC ghosts were exposed to either 100 μM NHS- or HO-pDMAA-Cy3 polymers for 30 minutes at 37°C. Epifluorescent images were captured after washing using an inverted Leica microscope at 40X. hRBC exposed to control polymer demonstrate negligible fluorescent signal (B) while those exposed to NHS-pDMAA-Cy3 exhibit strong fluorescence that diminishes over 2 hours (A). Representative images are shown for each time point. Scale bars measure 50 μm. Images were background corrected and the brightness/contrast for each channel was balanced using Image J software.