Barcikowski Collaboration Rotation Project
As a rotation student from the Biophysics depart, I’ll be spending the next six weeks or so helping Dr. Stephan Barcikowski use the nanomembranes to do a number of separations as part of a nanofabrication procedure. Dr. Barcikowski makes extremely pure gold and platinum nanoparticles (~10nm) colloids using laser ablation and then bioconjugates them with a small peptide (< 20 amino acides). As part of this procedure, he has three separations that he needs done:
- Separate 7nm gold nanoparticles bioconjungated to a smaller, < 20 amino acid sequence from the unbound peptides
- Fractionate bimodal gold in water – get everything smaller than 10nm
- Fractionate polydisperse platinum nanoparticles in water – get everything smaller than 5nm
I will be running each of these separations and writing a protocol for each, so that ultimately Dr. Barcikowski can get his filters directly from SimPore and know how to use them.
To familiarize myself with the lab, I have been working this week with Nakul to separate some stock solutions of 5, 10, 15, and 20nm gold particles in water.
These percentages each come from the Tecan absorbance instrument and were computed with a standard curve measured after passing the filtrate through.
Wish me luck