In the chemical engineering lab that I just started working in this semester, we are working to find biosynthetic hydrogels/polymers for the human body. There are several gel ideas that are currently being tested in the lab and they are all SUPER cool. One of the ones that I heard of is a gel that is liquid at very low temperatures (so that it can be sucked up into a syringe easily) and then when it gets injected into the body, it becomes solid-like and stretchy and they are hoping it may help people with blood clotting disorders. Isn’t that the coolest thing ever?? Anyway, the one that I am working on with my post doc is a gel that can successfully act as a selectively permeable membrane to certain proteins. (You will hear more about this in blog posts to come, I can promise that!) Basically, I’m working with my post doc to first purify many many proteins Its interesting, my post doc explained to me recently that in bio/chem/biochem labs the point of the experiments are to purify the protein to its highest level of purity, while in chem/biochem engineering labs (or in engineering in general) the point is to purify the proteins, but a more important point is to have as much volume of protein as possible in order to test it later. But something super interesting that I thought I’d share was how we are working on purifying the part of the protein that we want. Essentially, the structure of the protein