Behind scenes

Much of good science is opportunistic and revisionist.

-G. M. Whitesides

I am a lucky guy. Serendipity is a keyword that crosses my research. Most of my representative works stem from other projects by chance. Penicillin is the first antibiotic found by Sir Alexander Fleming and the most famous example of the serendipity of biological science.

According to John W. Creswell, "Research is a process of steps used to collect and analyze information to increase our understanding of a topic or issue." If one compares it to a journey, then it is how one can get from a point 'A' to a point 'B'. However, it is not always easy finding the direction and reaching the destination in research. Uncertainty and unforeseeable obstacles exist. Thus, one may arrive at a different conclusion, or point 'C', after tremendous trial and error. It is quite common in a research paper as it is not written in a chronological way.

On this page, I would like to show you the behind the scene of my research.

Here, I'll tell you the behind scenes of my researches.

As I mentioned below, the chain-like aggregation was the main problem that I suffered from. And how it really looks like (left pics).

On one hand, a left-side sample is clear, on the other hand, a right-side sample is aggregated.

Dec 29 2020

The fluorescence of the quantum dot is highly affected by the vicinity of gold nanoparticles.

If I take a look into the above aggregates in detail using TEM, what I would see was like that on the left TEM images.

Intriguingly, gold nanorods were aligned end-to-end assembly. The overall structure was the network structure of the GNR/mesoporous silica core/shell chain.

I thought this would be a good inorganic chain material because there have been rarely reported about chain-like networking based on nanoparticles.

Sep 18 2019

I and my colleague published a paper about the simple method for the synthesis of mesoporous silica nanoparticles at room temperature. Back then, I was synthesizing gold nanorods capped with mesoporous silica nanoparticles. However, the experimental condition was different from the general method to synthesize mesoporous silica nanoparticles. So we tried to conduct the same procedure just without inserting gold nanorods. And we got something. After some optimization, we were able to synthesize mesoporous silica nanoparticles with high monodispersity and defined size.

Aug 7 2017

I've found something interesting shape of nanoparticles while synthesizing gold nanorods capped with mesoporous silica. I think this shape might show a better property when it comes to biological interaction or else.

As you see, the silica layer protrudes with multiple branches. So I tear down the behind working mechanism of synthesis of these materials. I don't publish about it yet.

July 5 2017

Back then, I found something interesting (I'll update later) while synthesizing gold nanorods capped with mesoporous silica. So, I need spherical gold nanoparticles capped with cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB in short), so that I could use that gold nanoparticle as a perfect control group with only different in shape from gold nanorods.

Some day, I found few papers about CTAB-capped gold nanoparticles and read Xia's papers. Those gold nanoparticles were capped with the CTAB and the shape was perfectly spherical and even a crystallinity was a single crystalline. So I reproduced their method successfully.

Thanks to the great previous researcher, my research went on well. And it didn't take that long time to optimize it because I already studied it with gold nanorods.

And I found one thing that previous authors didn't mention in their papers. So I summarized it and published a paper. (link)

Photos of gold nanoparticles by their size

Colorful

Aug 30 2016

TEM image of iron oxide nanoparticles. When I was a fresh grad student, iron oxide nanoparticles were fascinating to me. It shows a direct reaction to the magnet. And its functionality is... needless to say, versatile. So I decided to synthesize it and wanna add this nanoparticle to my nanoparticle library.

I suffered from small debris as you see in the TEM image above.

Back then, I didn't know that but I finally found it. The problem was the atmosphere. Nitrogen gas gave me a solution to remove that debris. I don't know when I'll use this yet.

So clear without debris

The iron oxide nanoparticles were basically synthesized in an organic solvent such as 1-octadecene. Usually, chloroform is used to store the final product after washing, which means it's immiscible.

The left image shows iron oxide nanoparticles transferred into the water from the chloroform using CTAB as a zipping ligand. I've done it by using a well-known method. And it really looks like this

Feb 1 2016

I tried to synthesize gold nanorods capped with mesoporous silica. Cuz what I really wanted to do was a developement of drug delivery carrier using nanomaterials. Since early in the 2010s, mesoporous silica was highlighted as a carrier materials. So I also decided to synthesize it using GNRs as a core for functionality.

As you see, the first result was terrible. with a lot of core-free nanoparticles and aggregation. Cuz it was my first experience about core/shell nanoparticles. it was under totally different nature from monolithic nanoparticles.

Mar 6 2017

This TEM image was taken after an year since I started to synthesize GNR@mesoporous silica nanoparticles. For me, removing core-free nanoparticles was easy. However, the problem was chain-like aggregation. Back then, I didn't know what induced chain-like aggregations. After a long period of trial and error, I finally succeeded to synthesize discrete core/shell nanoparticles as you see on the left side.

I can't for get the moment that I saw that TEM image. I was so happy, I've seen that image again and and again for 3 days in a row.

I removed whole core-free nanoparticles and aggregations. Same as the case about gold nanorods I was able to learn a lot of things about core/shell type nanoparticles.

Based on the results what I found while optimization for this nanoparticles, I also published a paper. (link)

And..I didn't make any applications uinsg this (left image) but anyway I successfully incorporated fluorescent dye in the mesoporous silica layer.

And finally I summarized my results that I found while on the journey to synthesize gold nanorods and published my first paper. (link)

July 7 2015

On the day first in the office, I tried to search what can I do. And the first thing that I wanted to do after searching few papers about nanoworld was building an infrastructure, especially in terms of materials. So, I decided to build a nanomaterials bank for me in the future. There was no one who have studided about it in our lab, including my PI, so this was gonna be my own struggle. But I began my journey without thinking too much.

This TEM image of gold nanorods on left is extremely meaningful to me.

Since I started my life as a grad student, this was the very first success that encouraged me get into the field of nano-synthesis.

As my research note says, I started to synthesize gold nanorods on Dec, 6, 2014. So it took around 6 months to get this result. I was able to grow one step more in the middle of understanding the science and engineering of synthesis of nanocolloids.

I was just a little kid in Academia back then.

(My rearch note image back then)

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