Professor works with four students on three science projects during summer

Drugs, blood, and human regeneration.

Sounds like a summer blockbuster movie, but it actually describes the research Kim Frederick, associate professor of chemistry, was working on in her Haberlin lab over the last few months.

Frederick worked with four chemistry majors on campus on three different science research projects.

Along with Owen Fenton ’10, Frederick worked on developing a method for rapidly identifying and quantifying illicit drug mixtures.

“The end goal of this project is to develop a portable laser-based instrument which could be used in police cars to analyze confiscated drug samples on site,” says Frederick. Previously they had developed a computer-based method for identifying the drug in the sample even when it has been “cut” or diluted with inactive compounds like baking soda or corn starch. This summer they worked on developing the model for quantifying the drug in the cut mixtures.

The second project involved developing a rapid method for screening low abundance proteins. Many diseases in their early stages only show changes in proteins in small amounts in the blood stream, explains Frederick.

“We are developing a method to selectively fish out these proteins so that disease can be detected at an earlier stage,” she says. “To do this, we used gels made with guanosine, one of the building blocks of DNA.”

They also used this technique to screen drug/protein interactions. This project was conducted by Anne Kotze ’09 and funded by Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation and a fellowship from the Connecticut Business Industry Alliance.

Finally, Kyleen Swords ’08 and Stephen Crowley ’09 studied the behavior of polyelectrolyte multilayer materials which are of interest for applications such as artificial tissue, artery repair, drug delivery and environmental clean up.

“For these applications, it was necessary to understand how these materials behave when fluids flow over or through them,” says Frederick. “We used a technique called capillary electrophoresis to understand the polyelectrolyte behavior. Work on this project was funded by Research Corporation and the National Science Foundation.