Using lasers to understand drug-membrane interactions

Visit us in Daly Science Room 122 and email Dr. Stokes at gstokes AT scu.edu

Group Updates:

November 2019: Fabiola Gutierrez (Physics, ’20) recently returned from SACNAS (Society for the Advancement of Chicano and Native Americans in Science) conference which was held in Honolulu, Hawaii. She presented a poster there entitled, “Length and Charge of Water-Soluble Peptoids Impact Binding to Phospholipid Membranes” and along with her sister, Adriana, who is a researcher in the Abbyad Lab at SCU (Chemistry, ’22). Congrats for representing SCU!

August 2019: We have a new website! Julia and Ayush just joined us in lab this month. Chi and Zach learned to conduct fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) experiments from our neighbor and colleague, Dr. Paul Abbyad. Gigi is directing efforts to submit a manuscript on the antipsychotic drug, clozapine. We also re-arranged our laser setup for some fun co-propagating second harmonic generation experiments this summer–see photo below:

July 2019: We published a research article in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B. SCU alumni, Madeleine (’18), Jacenda (’18), Vivian (’18), Morgan (’19) and Anna (’17) are co-authors along with current SCU undergraduates, Fabiola (’20) and Kalli (from the Fuller Lab). “Length Impacts Adsorption of Water-Soluble Peptoids to Phospholipid Membranes” 2019, 123, 5822-5831. 10.1021/acs.jpcb.9b04641 Jacenda returned to campus from nursing school at USF to record our LiveSlides presentation and we celebrated over lunch!

June 2019: We bid a fond farewell to our recirculating water bath. It stuck it out for all the temperature-controlled experiments we needed for three peer-reviewed publications and died a valiant death! Rest in peace, Lauda M3…