The Haynes Research Group

Characterizing Chemical Messenger Delivery from Immune System Cells

Platelets, dendritic cells, and basophils all play critical roles in immune response via delivery of chemical messenger molecules. The secretion of chemical messengers from individual cells has not been quantitatively measured from any of these cell types to date. This work exploits carbon-fiber microelectrode techniques to measure real-time secretion from each of these cell types and aims to contribute understanding about immune response during allergic reactions.

This work is supported by a Kinship Foundation Searle Scholar Award.

Identification and Quantitation of Polychlorinated Biphenyl Compounds in Sediment and Soil Using Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering and Partial Least-Squares Analysis

A harmful class of sediment pollutants will be captured and quantitated in order to facilitate remediation efforts. The polychlorinated biphenyl compounds occur in complex mixtures of over 200 similar species, some of which are carcinogenic, and this method will allow on-site quantitative analysis and assessment of pollutant danger.

This work is supported by the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund.

Studying Immune Cell Response to Nanoparticles

The safety of nanoparticle consumption will be evaluated using electrochemical detection of histamine and serotonin exocytosis from primary culture murine mast cells, chromaffin cells, and dendritic cells. After exposing healthy cells to nanoparticle solutions with varied composition, size, surface chemistry, and concentration, probing the exocytotic behavior will surpass the utility of the standard live/dead cell assay by assessing the function of exposed immune system cells. The long-term goal of this research is to generate nanoparticle design rules to control the cell-nanoparticle interaction.

This work is supported by a 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Grant and an NSF CAREER award.

Fabrication and Application of Topographically Tunable Metal Nanostructures

This work will demonstrate a novel, inexpensive, and massively parallel fabrication scheme to create noble metal nanostructures in arbitrary, predetermined patterns. In this method, a nanostructure scaffold is created using layer-by-layer assembly of ion-enriched polyelectrolytes; the aspect ratio and spacing of the nanostructure scaffold can be systematically altered by controlling the pH and ionic strength of the polyelectrolyte deposition solution. After the noble metal is added to the scaffold using electroless deposition, the nanostructure can be used to probe fundamental size-dependent optical properties. This method offers significant improvements upon current parallel nanofabrication techniques, limited either by inflexible topography or the production of heterogeneous populations of nanoparticles, facilitating result interpretation and device fabrication.