Guest Lecture - Gabriel Montano
Justin Burr
The first thing that I thought was interesting about Gabriel's talk was how all the sciences
fit into nanotechnology. He had a picture with Nanotechnology in the center and Chemistry,
Biology, Physics, and Engineering interconnecting with it. He talked about how the word
nano can scare people and how micro is becoming the new thing because it is not scary to
people. Nano is the scale where assembly occurs at biology level. He does a lot of work
with Atomic Force Microscopy, this works by using a small tip about 2 Nano meters in size
to trace over samples and detect things such as chlorosomes. It draws a picture on the
computer and the places where there are chlorosomes will be raised up. This machine can
also be used to move the chlorosomes out of the way to see what is under them. I thought
this technology was very interesting and I would like to actually get to see it in action.
Three questions I didn't ask:
- What is the smallest thing the AFM can image?
- What is the hardest group of people to work with such as the engineers, biologist, chemists, or physicists?
- How did you get into the field of working with AFM?
Three future directions I would take the discussion:
- I would try to use these AFM's to try and move things around and possibly help build up antibodies in humans.
- I would try to incorporate 3D printers to this machine so you can see the images in 3D.
- I would try to create a way that the AFM can work faster to image things in motion.
