Week Five

The results from the last experiment I mentioned in my last blog post were inconclusive. Along with the next few experiments that had occurred after that. Now I'm not saying that it is impossible to get the data that we wanted to get with the materials that I was using, however, Professor Andresen pointed out that if the experiment was this finicky then no one would care about it enough to try to reproduce it. So later that day he found me a brand new batch of nano particles. This time we got Citrate coated gold nano particles and this changed our procedure slightly. The general idea now is to take the negatively charged gold nano particles and wrap positively charged PAH around the gold. Then we'll wrap the DNA around the PAH/Gold complex. I was very excited to get away from the old procedure that I couldn't figure out how to fix. The first problem we ran into with this new experiment was trying to coat the gold with the PAH. When I followed the old procedure something strange happened. 

Starting from the left is a 10^-2M NaCl solution, then a 10^-3M NaCl solution mixed with 10micrograms/mL of PAH, then Batch 4 of the citrate gold nanoparticles, and then on the left is a solution that mixed all of the previous three. It was very concerning that the final solution turned out purple. Something was definitely wrong, so I went to Fontaine to seek help. We tried every combination of her and my particles to see where exactly my purple solution had came from. We could not recreate the purple solution but we did eventually come out with a solution that would allow me to move onto the next step. At this point in time i'm about to mix my new Gold/PAH solution with some sheared DNA so it is looking exciting!