• Question: what is the most interesting thing you hav done in science?xxx

    Asked by xchelseaannex to Paige, Andrew, Ash, Gem, SJ on 28 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by rachelcunningham, harrietgilbraith96, minisam22.
    • Photo: Paige Brown

      Paige Brown answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      Well, I have done very many things that I find interesting!!!

      One thing that I did was to design these gold nanoparticles that looked like tiny boxes with holes in them… called gold nanocages! These particles could be used to attach drugs to the surface, or even to put drugs inside of them since they are hollow! They were very hard to make… they are made from a combination of silver and gold, and are 1000x smaller than the width of a strand of your hair!!

      You can read about how I made them here! http://blogs.nature.com/from_the_lab_bench/2011/05/12/modern-day-alchemy-turning-silver-to-gold

      I also succeeded in attaching RADIOACTIVE chemicals to these gold nanocages, which we can use to track where the gold nanocages go inside the body with radioactive imaging techniques known as positron emission tomography! I was just published (with my boyfriend on the paper too, since he worked in the same lab) for this work! http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn300464r

    • Photo: SarahJayne Boulton

      SarahJayne Boulton answered on 30 Jun 2012:

      Mine was also to do with nanotech however mine was the integration of nanosensors and electrodes to get real measurements from live cells.

      See the thing with nanotech devices is that lots of people use them for tracking and demonstrating the position of things, but not many people actually use them to make actual measurements – this is the hard bit.

      I made, in my lab, nanosensors that were responsive to free radicals (things that damage your DNA and are involved in cell communication). You can see a picture of them being filtered on my profile – just click on ‘read more’ under ‘me and my work’. I then put them inside some macrophage cells – immune cells that eat up things like bacteria and invading pathogens. The cool thing about my nanosensors is that they are made from a bio-compatible polymer, which means they are non-toxic to living organisms, unlike some metal and silicon made ones.

      At the way same time – I used some super special gold electrodes that I designed to listen in on the communication between cells – I measured the amount of free radicals that were being sent out from the cells to other cells.

      So what I got were REAL MEASUREMENTS from inside and outside of live cells at the same in real time. This had never ever been done before with the nanosensors, and I was totally chuffed to be the first person to do it!

      This work is reported in my PhD thesis, but isn’t published yet because we’re doing a series of similar experiments with muscle cells that compliment this work. Once everything is done – then we’ll publish.

      This is the link to a paper about the nanosensors my old group makes ::
      http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956566309002863

      …and here’s a couple of links to work I’ve done with the electrode technology!
      http://www.ncl.ac.uk/biomedicine/research/groups/publication/149931
      http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/rer/2012/00000017/00000003/art00003

    • Photo: Gemma Staite

      Gemma Staite answered on 1 Jul 2012:

      Personally my masters degree. I learned so much background about the way the bacteria and viruses infect us and survive. Also the project I did, I found really hard going but it was an interesting piece of work and made me really appreciate the kits we use. Plus, it was all worth it in the end

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