Nanoscale construction with DNA
When:
Thursday, April 19, 2012 - 7:00pm
Room:
E51-315
Lecturer(s):
Shawn Douglas, Wyss Institute, Harvard University 
The programmability of DNA makes it an attractive material for constructing intricate nanoscale shapes. One method for creating these structures is DNA origami, in which a multiple-kilobase single-stranded 'scaffold' is folded into a custom nanoscale shape by interacting with hundreds of short oligonucleotide 'staple' strands. I will talk about our efforts to realize demand-meeting applications of this method, including our recent development of nanoscale devices to mimic cell-signaling stimulation carried out by our own immune systems.
This meeting is sponsored jointly by the the GBC/ACM and Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society.
Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at http://www.gbcacm.org/. You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational emails about future talks at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/gbcacm, our self-administered mailing list.
Shawn Douglas received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Yale in 2003 and his Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard in 2009. His research interest is in developing experimental methods and software to construct and manipulate self-assembling biomaterials on the nanometer scale. He worked as a graduate student in the laboratories of William Shih and George Church to generate custom three-dimensional shapes using the "DNA origami" method, including a novel alignment medium for NMR structure determination of membrane proteins. He has also led the development of cadnano, an open-source computer-aided design software that aids in the design of 3D shapes. Contact: shawn.douglas@wyss.harvard.edu.
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