Bringing you the latest news from the Gerdon Research Group
A belated congratulations to Dr. Sean McHugh ’11 who successfully defended his PhD thesis in chemistry at Tufts University. Sean is the first alum of the Gerdon Research group to earn his PhD after his undergraduate degree at Emmanuel College. Sean is blazing new trails for Gerdon Research group members and we are all proud of him. Congrats...
After completing experiments to test the effect of gold nanoparticles on calcium phosphate mineralization in solution with a microplate reader, Alex has moved on to microfluidics as a new analytical tool. Microfluidics provides more quantitative data than the plate reader and Alex plans to test the same concentration of nanoparticles that he used in the plate reader. The flow cell was recently modified (repaired) with a pipette tip as an outlet which is different from standard flow cells used in Gerdon Lab. Will this ingenuity...
Emma is continuing with the affinity project and is always looking for new ways to evaluate the DNA aptamer affinity for calcium phosphate materials. While giving a presentation for the Introduction to Research Methods class last semester she made a connection between her research and the Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM). QCM is a technique based on the change in frequency and resistance that is affected by the adsorption of a material onto the quartz crystal. The unique part about QCM is that readings can be taken as the reaction is happening. It would be valuable to use the QCM to examine the kinetics of the binding of the DNA aptamers to HAP on a...
Jake spends a lot of time pipetting in the research lab when preparing his plate reader mineralization experiments. In his Analytical Chemistry lab last week, he was put to the test to truly see how well he can pipette when he was tasked with calibrating his own 1000µL pipette. He found that the pipette calibrated to within less than 2µL and with a very low standard deviation! Jake will continue to use his pipetting skills while preparing his mineralization solutions for G-quadruplex analysis in the research...
It’s not often that Dr. Gerdon gets to head into the lab to work on a new experiment, but the introduction of a new LC-MS instrument in the department was the right catalyst! Dr. Gerdon is hoping to using this instrument in the Analytical Chemistry class at the end of the Spring 2018 semester to help students study and quantify FDC dyes (Blue 1, Yellow 5, and maybe others) in a mixture. It’s a fun project and a great opportunity to work with a new instrument. Maybe there will be applications for studying DNA and calcium binding down the road as...
Dr. Gerdon is teaching the CHEM 1103 class this fall semester. This is an accelerated course that covers two semesters of general chemistry in just one term. Freshmen in this course have a strong background in chemistry and math coming into Emmanuel College and excel in this setting. In lab, these students get to learn more advanced techniques, including gold nanoparticle synthesis and analysis of mineralization. These students synthesized glutathione protected monolayer protected clusters (MPCs) and will test them as templates in calcium phosphate mineralization. This will help the research team understand the influence of nanoparticles on mineral formation. Thanks to the CHEM 1103...