Week 6

The final week!  Wow!  When I consider from where we started and where we now are in our research, I can definately say that we have come a long way!  We gave our Powerpoint presentations and printed our posters yesterday.   The posters are now hanging in their places in preparation for the presentations later today.  Sitting here with the rest of my 2012 RET group, I hear each one say how s/he has enjoyed this summer RET experience beyond what they ever expected.  We especially loved the way we dived into science content learning and immediately began our research projects.  This has been the best professional development any of us has ever participated in.  We all look forward to implementing our lessons with our classes and coming back during the year to share what we have done and, of course, to visit with all our friends here at the Photonics Lab at Boston University.  What a great summer we have had!  Thank you Mike, Cynthia, and Helen and all who so graciously took us into their projects.

Week 5

     This week we began more data analysis for the NSF AIR SP-IRIS.  Once this was done, we set to work to incubate our chips with viruses and were able to analyze the data from this experiment by Wednesday.  We ran the tests using the USBIOantibodies78B and 05E.  We were hopeful that these antibodies worked.  As indicated in the graph below, it appeared that there was some binding of viruses, but once George viewed our data, he pointed out that if viruses were attaching to our chips, the chips would be covered fairly evenly with the particles.  Instead, we got areas of heavy particle binding and some with little binding.  This can only indicate that there is unspecific binding, i.e., other matter is binding to the spot and not just virus particles.
   We hope to get one more experiment in before the end of next week.  This week got busy with working on our Powerpoint presentations and our final poster.  During these final weeks, there is much to get done.