Meredith Dennis

The element silver has a broad range of antibacterial properties, and silver nanoclusters are an excellent candidate to combat multidrug-resistant bacterial infections such as those caused by Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and Neisseria gonorrhoeae (N. gonorrhoeae). The challenge with microscopic clusters of silver, known as nanoclusters, as a form of antibacterial treatment however is balancing their bioactivity and biocompatibility to keep them large enough to elicit an immune response but small enough to be safely cleared from the body. This project aims to conjugate silver nanoclusters with virus-like particles (VLP) to increase the bioactivity of the nanoclusters while keeping the nanoclusters biocompatible. VLPs have proven to be successful transports for many antigens and have been successfully synthesized in the Lee lab for transportation of HPV and opioid derivatives.

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The VLPs and nanoclusters will be conjugated by lipoic acid derivatives connected to various peptide linkers of different composition, length, and flexibility in order to determine the best connecting molecule. These peptides are synthesized with solid phase peptide synthesis and characterized by HPLC and MALDI-TOF.