Marissa Gionet-Gonzales, Phd Email and Phone Number

Engineering Cell Instructive Hydrogels to Enhance the Therapeutic Capacity of Stem Cells for Tissue Engineering.

Main project was fabricating silica nanofibers for DNA extraction. In this research, silica nanofibers were produced via the sol-gel electrospinning method. These fibers were then used to extract dilute amounts of DNA. Through qPCR it was found that these fibers recovered a higher concentration of DNA compared to other silica based DNA extraction. The use of silica fibers in DNA and RNA extraction can potentially increase detection of disease and lower the cost and time of biological and medical research that rely on extraction.

Main project was working on Poly(β-amino ester) Drug delivery of Multiple siRNA to Brain Cancer Stem Cells. siRNAs are a very valuable tool used in gene silencing therapy due to their ability to selectively knockdown a gene complementary to its sequence. In this research a variety of genes characteristically over expressed in cancer, including YAP1, eGFR, and Survivin, were knocked down in brain cancer stem cells using siRNA delivered via poly(β-amino ester) nanoparticles. In order to optimize this knockdown, three isoforms targeting different regions of each gene were transfected into the cells. At three days post-transinfection, the RNA from the cells was collected and analyzed through qPCR to determine which isoform had the highest knockdown.