A Whole Lot of Waiting

This week I couldn't really do much lab work because I was waiting for the lysine I needed to cap my citrate gold nanoparticles with. For most of the week I read papers on the lysine capping process and on the theory of DNA-gold nanoparticle interactions. On Thursday, I finally got my lysine, I made stock solutions, and I combined them with the citrate gold nanoparticles to initiate the capping process. I wasn't able to clean the nanoparticles, however, as the students in Thompson's lab are finishing up their research and need the centrifuges for the next two days. I went ahead and characterized the unclean nanoparticles though with UV-vis, DLS, and Zeta. Next week I will clean and characterize the particles and attempt to wrap the sheared DNA around them.