Project Perseus

  Analyzing DNA-mercury Nanoparticles with Scanning electron Microscopy In the last post I discussed how I used fluorometry experiments to investigate the binding dynamics of DNA and mercury ions. In this post, I'm going to talk about how we visualized the DNA - mercury samples via Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) to get more information on the structure and morphology of the particles formed by these interactions. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words! Remember how I said that the DNA forms some kind of hairpin or secondary structure around the mercury ions? Well using SEM we were able to visualize these structures more closely and see how they behave! How did I Prepare the Samples for Visualization? These samples, especially samples containing biological material like DNA, cannot just be thrown into the microscope and visualized. If that happened, the DNA would actually be invisible because of its inability to conduct electrons, since the conductivity of electrons is...