Page 55 - Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program Proceedings 2017-18

School of Engineering
Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering

catalyst. Results show that the nanowires have better performance than commercial catalyst in terms of selectivity,
especially at low voltage.

Anode Materials for Lithium Ion Batteries

Supervisor: SHAO Minhua / CBE
Student: WOO Nam Jae / CENG Course: UROP1100, Fall

Usefulness of Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) has been widely recognized and they have been researched on even further
improvement in their efficiency and battery life. There are a few drawbacks addressed to be fixed for development of
LIB; in this research, instead of conventional electrode composition, that of only Si as active material and polymer was
assembled into a coin cell and tested. Data from testing result of assembled coin cell was then used to analyze its
characteristics; plotted graph of its measured capacity, current, voltage at different cycle numbers provided with an
information that explains how superior Si-polymer composition is in terms of different aspects such as capacity and
stableness at different current density.

Reusable Protein-based Materials for Uranium Extraction from the Ocean
Supervisor: SUN Fei / CBE
Student: PARK Ye Eun / CBGBM Course: UROP1100, Spring

Protein-based hydrogels consist of enriched or isolated proteins from natural extracellular matrix. Hydrogels are
promising candidates for material research and drug delivery due to their high water content, biocompatibility and
tuneable viscoelasticity. The following report is based on two different projects. In the training session, DNA cloning was
performed for proinsulin that would be used in research on drug delivery of insulin using hydrogels. Thus, experiment
techniques such PCR, gel electrophoresis, DNA purification, gel purification, etc. were learnt in lab. The cloned DNA were
sent to the DNA analysing company for sequencing and the obtained sequence was compared with the actual proinsulin
sequence using an online tool called Clustal Omega. Among the four samples, one sample matched the proinsulin
sequence and could be used for the next step of the insulin research project. For the individual project, three constructs
of Truncated Mussel Food Protein (TMfp)—TMfp3, TMfp5-1 and TMfp5-2— were extracted by transformation, seed
culture, protein purification, dialysis and lyophilization. This project’s goal is to evaluate the effect of THPC and lysine on
the stiffness of the hydrogel by varying only the THPC concentration and then varying only the number of lysine by using
TMfp3, TMfp5-1 and TMfp5-2, which has 3, 6 and 9 lysine respectively. The last step of the project would have been to
performrheology of the protein-based hydrogel to measure the stiffness. However, due to procedural issues, the
experiment had to be repeated and could not reach the last step. Thus, qualitative data could not be obtained for this
progress report.

Supervisor: SUN Fei / CBE
Student: WEN Evan Yu-an / CHEM Course: UROP1000, Summer

Owing to their great functional tunability and biocompatibility, protein-based hydrogels currently have a lot of potential
applications in the biomedical sciences. Many different cross linking methods have been investigated in making these
hydrogels. Also, there is an increasing demand for more functionalized hydrogels. This project aims to create a unique
type of hydrogel that can be easily functionalized. Lysine residues found on SpyTag can be cross linked with THPC to
form a hydrogel. Genetically encoded SpyTag-SpyCatcher chemistry can then be utilized to further decorate and give
different functions to the gel’s surface. The resulting hydrogels were shown to have high elasticity and viable
cytocompatibility.

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