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- All Subjects: Creative Project
- All Subjects: Biology
- Creators: School of Molecular Sciences
The colossal global counterfeit market and advances in cryptography including quantum computing supremacy have led the drive for a class of anti-counterfeit tags that are physically unclonable. Dendrites, previously considered an undesirable side effect of battery operation, have promise as an extremely versatile version of such tags, with their fundamental nature ensuring that no two dendrites are alike and that they can be read at multiple magnification scales. In this work, we first pursue a simulation for electrochemical dendrites that elucidates fundamental information about their growth mechanism. We then translate these results into physical dendrites and demonstrate methods of producing a hash from these dendrites that is damage-tolerant for real-world verification. Finally, we explore theoretical curiosities that arise from the fractal nature of dendrites. We find that uniquely ramified dendrites, which rely on lower ion mobility and conductive deposition, are particularly amenable to wavelet hashing, and demonstrate that these dendrites have strong commercial potential for securing supply chains at the highest level while maintaining a low price point.
Lyme disease is a common tick-borne illness caused by the Gram-negative bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. An outer membrane protein of Borrelia burgdorferi, P66, has been suggested as a possible target for Lyme disease treatments. However, a lack of structural information available for P66 has hindered attempts to design medications to target the protein. Therefore, this study attempted to find methods for expressing and purifying P66 in quantities that can be used for structural studies. It was found that by using the PelB signal sequence, His-tagged P66 could be directed to the outer membrane of Escherichia coli, as confirmed by an anti-His Western blot. Further attempts to optimize P66 expression in the outer membrane were made, pending verification via Western blotting. The ability to direct P66 to the outer membrane using the PelB signal sequence is a promising first step in determining the overall structure of P66, but further work is needed before P66 is ready for large-scale purification for structural studies.
Disclaimer: Due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, the final outcomes of this project were impacted and limited. Therefore, the rough draft practice podcast session has been uploaded to accompany the written thesis portion as final recordings could not be recorded at this time.
DISCLAIMER: Due to the unexpected COVID-19 pandemic, the attached podcast is a draft recording in lieu of the final recording
Disclaimer: The initial goal of this project was to present this information as a podcast episode as a part of a series aimed at teaching the general public about human physiological adaptations. Due to the circumstances with COVID-19 we were unable to meet to make a final recording of the podcast episode. A recording of a practice session recorded earlier in the year has been uploaded instead and is therefore only a rough draft.
In order to further compare porcine and human-derived enzymes, a determination of the enzyme effectiveness was done via digestion simulation. The digestion for both the human and porcine-derived enzymes consisted of three steps: oral, gastric, and intestinal. After the digestion, the absorbance for each enzyme class as well as a dilution curve of the formula used was read and recorded. Using the standard dilution curve and the absorbance values for each unknown, the formula and thus enzyme concentration that was lost through the reaction was able to be calculated.
The effectiveness of both the human and porcine enzymes, determined by the percent of formula lost, was 18.2% and 19.7%, respectively, with an error of 0.6% from the spectrophotometer, and an error of about 10% from the scale used for measuring the enzymes. This error was likely due to the small mass required of the enzymes and can be prevented in the future by performing the experiment at a larger scale.