IGEM:Harvard/2006/DNA nanostructures

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Revision as of 10:41, 6 July 2006

Project Overview

• Our goal is to to design and implement molecular containers, which can be dynamically opened and closed by an external stimulus.
• The containers will be implemented as DNA nanostructures, which afford a significant degree of positional control and chemical versatility.
• As an initial proof-of-concept, we plan to use our DNA containers to demonstrate controllable activation ("delivery") of anti-thrombin aptamers.
• We expect that molecular containers could have several interesting scientific and clinical applications, such as
  • Drug and gene delivery
  • Bio-marker scavenging (early detection of biomarkers)
  • Directed evolution (compartmentalized selections)
  • Using multiplexing for combinatorial chemical synthesis
  • Capture and stabilization of multiprotein complexes
  • Protein folding (chaperones)
  • Cell sorting

Container Specs

Container Designs

Design 1 hexagonal core, separate 1-ply lids

Design 2 hexagonal core, separate 2-ply lids

Design 3 rectangular core, continuous 1-ply lids

Design 4 hexagonal core, separate 1-ply lids

Coding

Existing code

• William's code (Python)

Presentations

Most recent (Week 3)

• Week 3 Presentation: Design Progress

Week 2: Original proposal

• Presentation Proposal

Working Team Members

• Tiffany Chan (talk)
• Katherine Fifer (talk)
• Valerie Lau (talk)
• Matthew Meisel (talk)
• ...and others are welcome!