Jul18
Posted on Jul 18 by
Two amazing high school students from Notre Dame Cristo Rey High School spent a week as part of the research team in the Gerdon and Lau labs in Chemistry at Emmanuel College. It was a great experience for the HS students and our undergraduate researchers to participate as students and teachers – we learned a lot from each other this week, built our confidence in the lab, and had a lot of fun. Melannie worked with the GRAB Lab team and did a great job synthesizing nanoparticles, purifying them, reacting them in a successful place exchange, and analyzing them with gel electrophoresis. That’s a lot of work for one week! Thank you to Dr. Lau, Dr. Deighan, Dr. Gian Grant at NDCR, and funding from IQHQ for making this happen. We hope to have more NDCR students work with us in the...
Jul15
Posted on Jul 15 by
After much trial and error with the QCM (Quartz Crystal Microbalance) flow cell design, a finalized set up has been achieved! With this new set up, Lana has been able to complete her dynamic mineralization control experiments and is moving on to experiments with DNA aptamers. Hopefully, things continue to run smoothly and comparisons between the aptamers and the control experiments can be made soon! While waiting for experiments to run, Lana likes to walk Boston in search of new restaurants, new foods, and especially new treats and desserts! Pictured here is collagen that has been fibrilized, washed, and dried on the surface of a QCM crystal. The collagen has this amazing diffraction effect that makes these great rainbow colors. We know that all the salt has been washed away when we can see these rainbows...
Jul07
Posted on Jul 7 by
Georgia can’t believe summer research is halfway through already! There has been great progress with TEM imaging, but she is still trying to troubleshoot IR, fluorescence, and AFM analysis. She has currently DIYed her own humidity chamber so she can do mineralization on the IR, and it seems to be going well. Although the heat is rising in the city, Georgia is excited for the second half of the summer. Overall, she thinks the project is going well and she is looking forward to getting her data together to hopefully get...
Jun20
Posted on Jun 20 by
Trouble-shooting experimental design is an every day task in the research lab. We are always trying to improve our experiments, optimize a parameter, or fine-tune the set up. Sometimes that aspect of research is the most fun! It can be even more exciting when experimental design means actually building an instrument (or a tiny part of a fluidic cell). If you need a special part, why not just 3D print it? Dr. Gerdon did some design, printed something at home, broke it, went to the Discovery Lab on campus, got some help, printed some more, tried it out, thought it was going to be amazing! Didn’t work. But we quickly pivoted to a new option that seems to work well! So, don’t give up, bounce back, and keep trying. Too bad the 3D print wasn’t what we needed, because it was...
Jun17
Posted on Jun 17 by
Ann-Lee is ready to ABSORB all this new chemistry knowledge through her time in research. In five weeks in the lab, she’s been researching mineralization of nanoparticles and DNA aptamers. She’s also been using a brand-new plate reader to track absorbance and will soon use gel electrophoresis and dynamic light scattering. Over the course of the summer, she hopes to learn new instruments that she can master when analyzing...
Jun09
Posted on Jun 9 by
Going with the flow! It’s already week 3 of summer research! Time moves fast when there are so many things to learn and so many experiments to run. Lana has jumped right into running QCM and collagen experiments and is quickly getting the hang of things. With a focus on dynamic mineralization, she has been trying out a new procedure that incorporates a peristaltic pump and recirculation of the mineralization solution. Would promising results thus far, she hopes to continue optimizing this new method in preparation for other experiments in the...
