PhD Ramblings

Scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) have today announced the detection of gravitational waves. The phenomenon was predicted a hundred years ago by Einstei...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/139117261341

phdr : > These are ecoli cells on a cover slip designed to stick to the tails > that project them along. Instead of the tails spinning round like > normal (check out...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/138081914656

phdr : > E coli swimming! The way we would swim doesn’t work when you get > to very small scales, like this bacteria which is about 0.000001m > small - not quite ...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/137616340232

I’ve recently been looking at DNA nanotechnology - systems of DNA strands that self-assemble to form structures of unprecedented detail. Now we’re going to look at something just a little bi...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/137406878867

BEADS PULLED AROUND BY DNA MOTORS DNA motors have progressed a lot in 10 years. The first motor consisted of a track and walker, completely made of DNA, requiring scientists to add further strand...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/137150932518

phdr : > NANOSCALE ROBOT A paper in Nature recently demonstrated how a > nanoscale ‘robot’ can take steps along a track. The robot is in > fact a small molecule w...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/136941948117

AUTONOMOUS DNA MOVEMENT Two groups of researchers showed that a DNA ‘motor’ could autonomously move between locations on a track. The entire system is made of synthetic DNA: a track consist...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/136876008575

CONTROLLING MOTION AT THE NANOSCALE Synthetic DNA has been used to make a whole range of structures, from nanoscale pyramids to smiley faces . But DNA can also be used to make motion at the nanos...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/136742176725

In the next few posts I will be looking at DNA nano motors - tiny strands of DNA that are moved between locations on a DNA structure. Nature contains many naturally occurring nanoscale motors, su...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/136253568539

DNA STRUCTURES ACROSS SCALES Over the last few posts we’ve seen many, but certainly not all, of the structures that can be made from synthetic strands of DNA. All these structures are small, na...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/136252969417

DNA MESH STRUCTURES The latest work in DNA nanostructures comes from researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. While most DNA structures use strands of DNA held together in parallel bund...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/136141784276

phdr : > GENOME SEQUENCING Recently I looked at how graphene might be used to > sequence DNA >  > - here’s another recent advance that uses one protein to chop up >...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/135970235029

PUNCHING HOLES IN MEMBRANES Researchers from Technische Universität München (Munich) designed a 3D DNA origami consisting of a barrel with a small 2 nm channel running through it. The origami ...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/135846187066

phdr : > DNA ROBOT FOR TARGETED DRUG DELIVERy Researchers from Harvard > created a nanoscale container that breaks open when it encounters > cancer cells, causing the ce...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/135505236721

DNA ROBOT FOR TARGETED DRUG DELIVERy Researchers from Harvard created a nanoscale container that breaks open when it encounters cancer cells, causing the cells to die. To create the container, th...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/134793543166

DNA NANOSTRUCTURES William Shih of the Wyss Institute (Harvard), one of the inventors of 3D origami , talks us through DNA nanostructures and their applications. Parts 2 and 3  are also availab...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/134585241025

phdr : > DNA ORIGAMI CONTAINERS The latest issue of Science >  features work creating 3D curved > nanoscale containers made from DNA. The shapes are formed using the >�...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/134394087423

3D ORIGAMI Researchers at the Wyss Institute (Harvard) first came up with a technique to design 3-dimensional DNA origami . The image on the left shows 100 different designs of DNA origami and on...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/134263606344

WHAT TO MAKE WITH 3D ORIGAMI? Experts in the field of DNA nanotechnology talk about future applications of the nanoscale structures made out of hundreds of strands of DNA .

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/133791818045

DNA CURVED STRUCTURES One way to make a 3D shape out of DNA is to take a flat 2D origami and make it curved. Researchers at Arizona State University made several containers measuring 10-100 nm ...

https://phdr.tumblr.com/post/133462028511