Dr. Fredy Zypman, a professor of physics and chair of the physics department at Yeshiva University’s Yeshiva College, believes the key to major advances in medicine, electric cars and other fields, lies precisely in nanoparticles.
Together with his research colleague Dr. Steven Eppell, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University, Zypman has been awarded a $412,000 grant by the National Science Foundation.
With the grant, the two will work to develop a groundbreaking technique allowing scientists to map and measure electrical charge distribution on the surface of nanoparticles and tiny molecules. Eppel will collect the experimental data, while Zypman focuses on the theoretical analysis and software development at YU.
The research is important, because charge distribution affects many natural processes. It determines the communication that allows some proteins in the body to create tissue, which is a mechanism called “self-assembly” that could yield revolutionary advances in biology and disease treatment if it was better understood.
Zypman's research hopes to find a way to use that process for medicinal purposes, by discovering tools to locate charges and determine the charge value of any specific molecule.
“If we knew where charges were located in a protein, we would also know what the forces of interaction were that would cause them to self-assemble correctly, but the main problem for us is that we don’t know where those charges are,” said Zypman.
“We’re at a very primitive stage of understanding the charge content of very small systems. Proteins, nanoparticles - we’re talking about systems that are 10,000 to 100,000 times smaller than the thickness of a hair. People commonly use 100-year-old techniques to measure charges in systems like this.”
Atomic force microscope
According to Zypman, the key to advancing our understanding of these systems is hidden in the sensor of an atomic force microscope, a high-resolution device for studying objects at a resolution higher than 1,000 times the magnitude of a standard optical microscope.
Zypman aims to develop a technique to better understand the sensor’s behavior so they can retrieve and analyze that data, a feature that hasn’t been developed by the companies that produce the microscope.
To achieve this, he and his student researchers - currently four Yeshiva College students assisting him with the project, along with a PhD student who will join them next fall - have to analyze the dynamics of the atomic force microscope in an unconventional way.
“We’re measuring the tiny forces that are active at a substance’s surface, which lets us ultimately figure out how much electric charge the substance surface contains,” explained Yitzchak Fried, a junior at Yeshiva College. “We study a rod that bends and vibrates due to the forces exerted on it by our sample. By measuring the way the rod vibrates, we can derive the forces acting on it.”
Ultimately, Zypman hopes to create a graphic user interface and package the software he and his students design, so as to make this information easily accessible to researchers and industry.
He hopes that the ability to better understand charge content and location in small systems could solve problems in fields that range from biology and chemistry to environmental science and car design. Zypman anticipates the new grant will help him and his collaborators to see meaningful results from their work in a few years.