Applications of Responsive Assembly and Disassembly of Colloids

• Author / Creator

  Liu, Yuning

• 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

  • Micelle
  • Gold nanoparticle
  • Oligonucleotides
  • Fuel-driven
  • Assembly

• Graduation date

  Fall 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-xqh6-e885

• License

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