Here is the link to an abstract about the research I did during summer 2012 at the University of Minnesota.
http://www.mrsec.umn.edu/EHR/participants/2012Participants.php
It was work that represents how collaborative research can be. I was working in an Engineering and Materials Science lab, researching how pores which form in lipid membranes can be “sealed,” basically plugged. One might propose a reasonable question: what does biology concerning membranes have to do with materials science? The answer is that there are all sorts of questions concerning Biological problems which can be addressed using basic chemical principles. In this case, we used our understanding of the amphiphilic structure of a lipid to design synthetic polymer which had this same quality. It was our hope that due to similar character, it would mimic lipid behavior and aggregate in the same way a lipid would with the goal of filling developing pores in membranes. To study this, we used a device called a Langmuir Trough, which was essentially a small pool of water. We inserted a mixture of biomolecules found in the membrane of muscle tissue from rabbits into the trough and measured the density of lipids, or put another way amount of aggregation of the lipids in the monolayer formed. We then decreased the lipid density by making the outline of the trough wider, and then inserted our synthetic lipid. The idea was to see how the lipid density of the monolayer was affected with the addition of the synthetic polymer, hoping to see an increase in density and return to the density the monolayer was at before expanding the width of the trough. If this was the result, we could conclude some kind of “sealing” of the model membrane (in monolayer form) occurred. I gained a lot from the experience because of how collaborative it was. The grad student I worked with was a great mentor. However in hind sight, I think she often got frustrated because her background was not in Biochem. It was in Chemistry and chemical engineering, which was the typical background for her lab; the other people in her lab (all males btw) were not working with Biological material. I think had she had more understanding concerning how properties like polarity, molecular weight, size, and perhaps most importantly non-covalent bonding such as vanderwals can be applied to biology such as the impact on lipid aggregation, she might have had more variables to consider, and more general understanding to work off of.