Session: Undergraduate Research Posters: Inorganic Chemistry:

Collagen plays a vital role in bone development as it is the main structural unit on which bone forms. A part of bone prosthetic research and other biomimetic areas of study involves understanding the development of collagen and its mineralization process. Collagen mineralization has been widely studied but there remains a lack of time-resolved and quantitative data for the onset of mineralization. In this work, a hydrophobic self-assembled monolayer was used to optimize collagen immobilization on the QCM surface, showing that hydrogels stabilized within 30 min with an average mass of 1.5 + 0.2 μg. Collagen mineralization experiments involve introducing calcium and phosphate precursor solutions and non-collagenous templating molecules such as poly-aspartic acid and DNA aptamers. The mass and morphology of both collagen hydrogels and mineralized hydrogels will be measured using QCM and SEM. Ultimately, these results would provide more information about early events of mineralization in collagen and show the effect templates have on the mineralization of collagen.

Gabrielle Zabala

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