A Study of the Effects of Salt Nucleation on Doped Amino Acid

Overview

My interest in chemistry and crystal-structures brought me to a recent abstract discussing adding salt in an attempt to enhance the crystal growth of large, organic molecules. From this I hypothesized the addition of salt compounds would enhance the crystal growth of amino acids and might affect crystal structures and spectral lines.My test salts were NaCl, KCl, and MgSO4 * 7H2O. My test amino acids were L-glutamine, L-lysine, L-glycine, L-arginine, L-glutamic acid and L-valine. I heated each amino acid solution according to the suggested temperature and added salts as appropriate. I then proceeded to capture the spectral lines of the crystals once they had precipitated using a cd spectroscope I built. The addition of NaCl or KCl generally accelerated the precipitation of the amino acid solutions. MgSO4 often stabilized crystal growth and resulted in crystals with fewer imperfections. These results might have future applications in materials science or biochemistry.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Chemistry (Junior Division) · Entry J-05-10

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Chemistry projects
• CSEF Chemistry projects
• Every CSEF 2026 project