End of Second Semester

Throughout this semester we’ve been trying to make our nanoparticles a lot smaller than we actually got them. After hard work, a lot of research and probably hundreds of experiments we actually got them smaller.  Before, we got the particles on the 50nm-60nm scale but we actually needed them to be in a range of 1-10nm in order to work with the protein Troponin. After different experiments we got the particles to be in 2nm, which is a pretty good size. We know the size of the nanoparticles by using the Scanning tunneling microscope (STM)  which is a powerful technique for viewing surfaces at the atomic level. The advantage of this microscope is that it can probe the density of the sample. It can also measure the surface of a sample even if it is 0.1nm of length. The STM did really help us to find the size of our particles.

Hopefully, in the next semester we’ll use the protein we want to see if it can react with our nanoparticles. If this can be done successfully our mission in the project will be accomplished.