IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM

7:00 PM, Thursday, 19 April 2012

MIT Room E51-315

Nanoscale construction with DNA

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. shawndouglas.jpg

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.

This joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM will be held in MIT Room E51-315.  E51 is the Tang Center on the corner of Wadsworth and Amherst Sts and Memorial Dr.; it's mostly used by the Sloan School. You can see it on this map of the MIT campus. Room 315 is on the 3rd floor.

Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at https://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/computer/. You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational emails about future talks at https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ieee-cs, our self-administered mailing list.

Updated: Mar 29, 2012.