I made a youtube video every weekday in 2017. That experience pulled me into the world of battery chemistry. Daily vlogging was hard but taught me something about social media, science outreach, and the topics that people are interested in. I was a little surprised to find that people were so interested in batteries. I like the opportunity to explore something that is of wide interest. Everyone has a battery in their pocket, and everyone wants them to last longer.

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We’ve been selecting aptamers in the lab for the last year. Having a qPCR on the bench has really helped, and so we wrote up a methods paper in ACS Combinatorial Science. The company that made our qPCR instrument has put up a blurb about it, too.

The qPCR function is great for cycle course optimization, and we have been using the melt curve analysis function of the Open qPCR (thermofluorimetry) to do a binding assay. It works pretty well. We put a dye in with the aptamer and measure the temperature at which the dye dye-DNA complex melts. The bound aptamer has a different melt temperature, so it gives a specific signal. We plot that specific signal as a function of concentration and to determine the binding constant. It’s based on the Easley lab’s method paper from 2015 with low-cost equipment.

The instrument simplifies some of the more touchy parts of the aptamer selection. Undergrads have been turning rounds pretty efficiently this year with the help of the open qPCR instrument.

We have also been using graphene oxide to try some selections. I have only heard of graphene oxide SELEX recently, but it grabs unstructured DNA to separate them from aptamers bound to target. It’s looking good. I hope to report on that soon.

Thank you to all of the kind supporters who helped raise money for undergraduate research in iron batteries here at the U of Idaho. Together we put together $5000 that will be put toward a fellowship and materials for a student to explore this and we will put together a open source plans document next year. We’re also going to document the process with a weekly video about the project, so please do stay tuned.

I’ve launched a crowdfunding campaign to try to support a student in building an iron battery. I’ve got video up that talks about where we’ve been so far this year. We have had some success in building the battery and we’re moving to a better construction method.

We would like to test different cathode salts including a better test of potassium ferricyanide. We would also like to test different solvents such as a deep eutectic solvent and ionic liquid. The big, open question is the separator. We can try some natural gels, some in-house polymers and we can see if we can find a commercial polymer that is cheap and available enough to do the job.

I think it will be a great project for an undergraduate chemist with an interest in renewable energy. If you’d like to check out or share the campaign, the link is here:

http://c-fund.us/cg0

I’m attending The Northwest Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Corvallis. I just wandered around downtown. That was nice. My hope is to see some computational chemistry, commercialization, and nanoparticles tomorrow.

What tools are getting used for simulations? I’m especially interested in coarse-grained simulations of macromolecules. I see several Density Functional Theory talks and that should be interesting. Maybe folks from that world can point me in the right direction. Is anyone using tensorflow for such things?

There’s a panel on market-driven innovations. I would love to hear if people are funding academic labs through collaborations with industry. I feel like that would be a win-win, but I don’t know where to start there, either.

There’s also a bunch of analytical chemists giving MS talks and a “smart” nanoparticle talk. That’s just the morning session. I’ll have a hard time choosing.

If you’re in Corvallis and are reading this, do please shoot me a gmail (pballen). I’ll buy the first round at Tommy’s.