Bringing you the latest news from the Gerdon Research Group
Dianna has been back in the lab after a hiatus this summer making progress on the nanoparticle project. She has improved upon her original nanoparticle synthesis protocol and started working on the PEG attachment protocol. As the semester comes to a close, Dianna hopes to obtain TEM and 1H NMR spectra of her TMPCs with PEG attached to the surface. Overall, it’s been a productive semester in...
Luz has continued to work towards understanding the influence of different textiles on the GC-MS analysis of combustible materials, with an eye on forensics applications. Luz has been working with several different textiles and diesel standards in acetone. Due to technical difficulties with an unhappy computer, she had a frustrating time in lab. This was disappointing since it has been a week since she’s been in lab after the holidays and she is eager to finish and gathering data. This is a good reminder that research is exciting, but not always easy and often times frustrating. At our weekly group meeting teammates were able to listen to Luz, sympathize with the frustration, and share similar stories of delay, delay, delay….followed by eventual success! Luz will be back in the lab tomorrow to get the GC-MS back on track. She was able to prep textile samples to be ready for the next...
Dr. Gerdon has had a very slow time in the lab this semester (where do the hours go?), but he is proud to have made some “small” progress on using the AFM at the MIT Koch Institute to image DNA origami tiles seen here. These tiles are about 60 x 90 nm in size and about 2 nm tall! So cool! There’s more work to be done, particularly in purifying them to improve quality, but the progress feels...
Julia has been excited to start research again in the Fall. She has been doing a lot of data analysis and continues to conduct collagen mineralization experiments using a Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM). She is looking forward to continue improving the methods of these experiments and learn more about the process of collagen...
This semester, Amanda has been busy continuing her work with collagen hydrogel mineralization! She has done a few different experiments with collagen and DNA aptamers, including her most recent experiment, which was a 7-day mineralization reaction. These hydrogels will be used for SEM imaging, which means she will have more cool images to analyze! Amanda is also planning a new experiment to better understand the kinetics of the mineralization reaction. She is excited to try this experiment and learn how to use another...
Grace is excited to be back in the research lab this Fall to continue work from her summer internship. She will continue with Solid Phase Microextraction (SPME) and GC/MS analysis of ignitable molecules to continue developing methods and an in-house reference library of these molecules. Her first experiment back was completing the SPME analysis of octane when not combusted and combusted. She is excited to continue this work and to see what the GRAB lab with achieve this...