All the gold I've ever wanted

Mod 3 was by far the most relaxed module of the year. I really appreciated this because, since so many of us are in 20.320, it was a stressful time in a lot of other classes. I really enjoyed learning about how biology can be used to make materials usually not made with biology. Although the other two modules were cool as well, this was the first module that really made me feel like a bioengineer.

Everything we did to prepare was pretty simple, since we didn't do the phage screening to find the best mutant, which would have taken more time. We prepared our phage in the gold solutions. May I just say, I did not expect gold nanoparticles to be a purple/reddish color. It was pretty cool to be able to tell my friends I was working with gold in my bio lab.

After our nanowires dried for a couple of days, we were able to image them with TEM. When we went into the room, Professor Belcher and Jifa were imaging the no-gold control. We saw what the Fe(III)PO4 were supposed to look like. Then, Jifa began imaging our nanowires. ALL WE SAW WAS GOLD.

 Although, since Professor Belcher told us we had more Fe(III)PO4 than most other groups, we weren't as worried. Then came the moment of truth. We charged our battery with the 9volt battery for around 10 seconds. Then we put the LED light on and we were SHOCKED when it turned on. Our battery worked, and I was ecstatic. Even though we have to charge it everytime we wanted to use it, this was one of the coolest things I've ever built.

For the last part of the year, we had to come up with our research proposal. This was probably the hardest thing we'd done all semester. Coming up with an idea took days. Additionally, after we had our idea, we had to polish it, which took even longer. While we were making our slides, we ran into many questions and problems with our idea. However, we finally finished and didn't die while presenting. It felt great to be done with this module and the semester. It may have been stressful, but the research proposal was a great experience and is a useful skill to have for our future.