Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials Colloquium William M. Shih
| When: | Th 06-06-2013 at 16:00 |
| Where: | 5111.0080 |
| Speaker: | prof.dr. William M. Shih |
| Affiliation: | Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Department of Cancer Biology, 44 Binney St., Boston, MA 02115, USA; Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, 3 Blackfan Circle, CLSB 5th Floor, Boston, MA 02115, USA |
| Title: | DNA nanostructures as building blocks for molecular biophysics and future therapeutics |
| Date: | Thursday Jun 6, 2013 |
| Start: | 16:00 |
| Location: | FSE-Building 5111.0080 |
ABSTRACT:
Our group previously solved a key challenge for nanotechnology: programmable self-assembly of complex, three-dimensional nanostructures. Our solution was to build custom three-dimensional structures that can be conceived as stacks of nearly flat layers of DNA. I will discuss applications of this technology for molecular biophysics and therapeutics: (1) weak-alignment media for NMR structure determination of membrane proteins such as UCP2, a 30 kDa six-transmembrane helix mitochondrial proton transporter; (2) scaffolds for determining the number of SNARE complexes required for lipid-bilayer fusion; (3) how shape and size of DNA nanoparticles affects the rate of cellular internalization.