Jun07
Posted on Jun 7 by
Marissa is excited to be back in Boston working on her research with gold nanoparticles. Now that the stressful spring semester has concluded, she can now place her full attention on her research. She has started work in developing new methods to characterize her nanoparticles, particularly in agarose gel electrophoresis to differentiate charges. She also aims to make progress on mineralization with nanoparticles, along with other experiments. Outside of research, she plans to traverse the Boston area and take advantage of the relatively cooler days before it heats up in July. This will be her last summer living in Boston so she wants to make the most of the time she has...
May29
Posted on May 29 by
Undergraduate researchers in the Department of Chemistry & Physics gathered on Friday to celebrate the start of the summer with fantastic Thai food, tasty burgers, and gigantic paper airplanes. It’s harder than it looks to make a good paper airplane out of an old research poster, but still a ton of fun. Welcome to Juan, Marissa, Georgia, and Dennis as they carry on the GRAB Lab tradition of amazing summer research progress. See you in the...
May29
Posted on May 29 by
Saturday, May 18th brought a beautiful and celebratory commencement exercise to campus at Emmanuel College! It also brought to an end a wonderful and productive research experience for these four amazing GRAB Lab seniors. Congrats to Donalissa, Kristy, Sydney, and Hailey! You brought tremendous enthusiasm for chemistry, nanoparticles, collagen, origami, calcium, TEM, AFM, ICP, NMR, fluorescence and so much more. You also brought your growing expertise in each of your areas of study. THANK YOU for being what is always the best part of this group – you! The chemistry is pretty great too. Godspeed on all of your future chemistry fun and make sure you return to campus...
May14
Posted on May 14 by
With the semester coming to an end, Juan gets ready for a summer full of research! Although many current GRAB Lab members will be graduating and missed, the research must go on! There are many plans for the summer. Currently, experimental methods on decreasing the amount of collagen on the surface of the quartz crystal are being conducted in hopes of seeing a decrease in frequency, indicating an increase of mineral mass. Hopefully, a decrease in frequency will be seen this summer (fingers are...
May14
Posted on May 14 by
As the semester is wrapping up, Marissa is looking forward to new experiments to be conducted over the summer. As the place experiments are progressing and seem to be working, there are new ideas on how to characterize these nanoparticles. After discussing with several people during the ACS Conference, she plans to run the nanoparticles through a relatively high agarose gel to see how different charges and sizes separate. In the meantime, she is back to synthesize even more nanoparticles to continue the place...
Apr07
Posted on Apr 7 by
Congratulations to the whole group and particularly to Kassidy, Kristy, Amanda, and Marielle on their new publication, “Equilibrium interactions of biomimetic DNA aptamers produce intrafibrillar calcium phosphate mineralization of collagen” in Acta Biomaterialia! This has been a work in progress for a long while and is our first foray into collagen hydrogels, intrafibrillar mineralization, the PILP mechanism, and bone-like materials. This is a huge step for us! Thank you to Laurie Gower (U Florida) for providing some protocols and insight to get us on our way with. this. Marielle really began the whole project by being the first student to create collagen hydrogels on campus. Kassidy did the experiments that first showed the impact of DNA aptamers on collagen mineralization. Kristy and Amanda got into the chemistry behind it all to show affinity and uptake of chemical precursors to try to explain what is really happening. This was a great group effort and is something we can build on! Thank you to Emmanuel College and the National Science Foundation (DMR 1904460) for funding of this...
