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Applications of Responsive Assembly and Disassembly of Colloids
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- Author / Creator
- Liu, Yuning
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The processes of assembly and disassembly of colloids has rapidly grown in interest over the decades. Assembly and disassembly are able to respond to the changes in conditions, which makes them important in sensing and stimuli-reponsive processes. There are two applications based on assembly and disassembly processes respectively in this thesis. In one example, fuel is used to drive the dissipative assembly process of forming spherical micelles by molecules that are temporarily mode amphipathic by the addition of fuel. In the other, oligouncleotidess triggered the disassembly of DNA modified gold nanoparticles , which leads to a colour change allowing the method to be able to detect biomarkers.
In Chapter 2, the dissipative amphipathic molecules are synthesized by copper (I)-catalysed azide–alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC). These amphipathic molecules are able to self-assembly to spherical micelles by consuming a chemical fuel such as 1-ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)carbodiimide (EDC). The process of self-assembly and dissipation of micelles is determined by analytical methods, such as fluorescence, dynamic light scattering, and transmission electron microscopy.
In this study of disassembly in Chapter 3, we combine DNA-gold nanoparticle aggregates with an amplification method to detect RNA biomarkers. The DNA amplicons are able to trigger the disassembly of DNA-gold nanoparticles to achieve a colorimetric detection. In addition, selectivity experiments show that colorimetric detection can distinguish the target RNA with single-base mismatch RNA and non-match RNA. Also, target RNA spiked in human lungs total RNA can also be detected by this method. Afterwards, we reduced aggregates to improve the sensitivity of our method.
In chapter 4, we provide some ideas to further explore the research described in this thesis. These future works focus on the optimization of the applications in assembly and disassembly processes. -
- Subjects / Keywords
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- Graduation date
- Fall 2019
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Master of Science
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.