New Instruments in the Clear Lab

Assistant professor Kasey Clear is our newest faculty member.  He joined the department in the fall of 2019 and quickly began to set up his laboratory for research. Clear found that he was missing a few things, but he was able to obtain them this year.  

Column Chromatography System (on the left)

Clear's January purchase of the blue Biotage Isolera One allows for automated column chromatography. It mixes solvents to change elution gradients, has a UV detector to create a chromatogram, and it also has a fraction collector! Biology major Danielle Voss used this device to purify reaction products in her urushiol synthesis in Clear's lab. Urushiol is the "poison" in poison ivy.

Freeze Dryer (in the middle)

At the start of the fall semester the Clear lab obtained a VirTis Lyophilizer which is used in combination with a freezer to remove water from a sample. Rather than boil or evaporate water from a sample, the sample is first frozen and then pressure and heat from the lyophilizer causes the frozen water to sublimate directly to gaseous form to dehydrate the sample. The cryobath (from Professor Bill Feighery) standing to the right of the Lyophilizer is used to freeze the samples before they are loaded onto the lyophilizer. Chemistry major Sabrah Alajmi used it many times during the fall semester to remove water from the products of polyallyamine guanylation reactions to isolate the polyallyamine-polyallylguanidine copolymer. 

Vacuum Oven (on the right)

Clear also purchased a Fisher Scientific Vacuum Oven with the freeze dryer. They arrived together during the first week of fall classes in a single crate that nearly took up the entire hallway! His group will use the oven to prepare polymer networks in future work. 

Rizk and Students Publish Research

Professor Shahir Rizk has published research in the Journal of Protein Engineering, Design, and Selection. This work was performed with two undergraduates, biology major Pierre N'Guetta and biochemistry major Maggie Fink, who have both since graduated and are now attending graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Notre Dame, respectively, in pursuit of their Ph.D. degree. The picture above, taken from their paper, shows the conformational change in a protein caused by the binding of glyphosate.  The structure of a protein (or any molecule) determines its properties so that a change in structure causes a change in its properties. In this case the binding of glyphosate to the protein causes a change in the way the protein fluoresces which translates into a signal indicating the presence of glyphosate.  You can read the abstract here: Abstract