Jun17
Posted on Jun 17 by
Alex has spent the beginning of the summer investigating the effects of the selected aptamers on the morphology and crystallinity of calcium carbonate. Although there is a lot of TEM and FT-IR to do, there is some leftover work with calcium phosphate. Alongside calcium carbonate experiments, Alex has been testing the affinity of the DNA to calcium phosphate using a FAM labeled aptamer. A test run was performed and the aptamer successfully attached to the mineralized calcium phosphate and...
May31
Posted on May 31 by
Browsing through the most recent edition of Chemical & Engineering News? Interested in landing that first industry job after graduation? Then you might have read Krista’s interview where she offers that, “My advice to current students is to welcome changes and new directions, and don’t get flustered when your schedule has to change on the fly. Just roll with the punches that science (and life) throws at you!” Great advice from Krista and from other chemists in their first industry job. The whole article is great if you’re pondering where chemistry can take you. One more piece of advice – keep up with Twitter and be sure to respond when an editor puts out a call for essays about your experiences. Way to go...
May31
Posted on May 31 by
Summer research is a magical time in the lab for Dr. Gerdon and research students. The stress of the semester starts to fade away and there’s finally enough time to take a deep breath, focus your attention to research, and let your mind wander towards new ideas. Summer research is a time to put your head down and power through a big list of experiments and it is a time for using your creativity to dream up a new experiment or new approach. Dr. Gerdon has been helping Alex come up with a new strategy for isolating mineral product for IR analysis and he’s tried a few one-off experiments with calcium carbonate mineralization. Here’s an interesting experiment where Dr. Gerdon inadvertently mineralized calcium carbonate on the surface of a glass slide using a 96 well-plate. Maybe not very useful, but...
May31
Posted on May 31 by
Now that the 2018-2019 school year has come to an end, summer research has begun! Alex and Stephanie are working on optimizing the conditions for their calcium carbonate experiments. Stephanie, specifically, has been working on choosing between optical density and absorbance as a way of measuring the kinetics of calcium carbonate mineralization and how DNA affects it. Absorbance would be more sensitive but doesn’t have a flat baseline while optical density has a flat baseline but too much noise. Which method will Stephanie end up going with? Stay tuned....
May09
Posted on May 9 by
The end of the semester is upon us and that has brought so many distractions from research and from regular blog posts. This is rightfully so, of course, because classes must come first! Still, the group was able to get together to celebrate the end of this academic year with a group picture and a trip to Tasty Burger. Thanks for a great semester of research! Let’s carry all of those experiments into the summer with Stephanie and Alex, and an occasional visit from Kassidy, Dianna, Amanda, and Logan. An even bigger thank you is in order to the seniors, Emma, Jake, and Marielle, for their hard work over the years! See you at...
Mar28
Posted on Mar 28 by
Marielle has been working hard this semester trying to adhere collagen hydrogels onto gold surfaces. Last week’s attempted experiment left her puzzled as there was no gelation of the collagen solution on the gold plate. This week, Marielle revised the experiment adding a positive control and another method for dropping the collagen solution onto the gold plate. Marielle was pleased to find positive results as the new method allowed for visual confirmation of the gelation of the collagen as seen in the picture. Since Marielle has been working towards this goal all semester, she couldn’t help but feel excited about these...
