Bringing you the latest news from the Gerdon Research Group
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...
Congrats to Grace, Luz, Julia, Rylie, and Amanda on their fantastic presentations at the Summer Research Poster Session on Thursday. Everyone did amazing work this summer and turned it into great poster presentations for the College-wide event. The students were tasked with explaining their research to chemistry professors alongside first year students in gen chem, which is not an easy task! Next step – turn these posters into abstracts for an ACS...
This summer the team had the great opportunity to work with Esther Hines, high school chemistry teacher at Billerica Memorial High School. Esther came to campus, joined our group, and engaged in exciting research involving calcium phosphate mineralization and gold nanoparticles. This fall we got to change the experience by visiting Esther and her students at BMH. Her AP Chemistry and Organic Chemistry classes joined together to hear about Emmanuel College, majoring in chemistry, and about undergraduate research on campus. Luz, Rylie, and Amanda then held “office hours” for high school students to drop in and chat about anything ranging from college life to careers to details about their research projects. This was a great experience for all involved. The students were fantastic and BMH is a beautiful place! Thank you to Esther and her class for hosting...