Abstract
DNA is one of the most essential elements in life as it carries genetic information. The ability to process the information may also be exploited to translate DNA into an engineering material. This talk will show how molecular information may be harnessed and programmed into nanoscale structures and machinery. I will first introduce the field of DNA nanotechnology and discuss how DNA molecules can be used to construct programmable designer nanomaterials. I will showcase several architected metastructures and highlight their unique characteristics compared to macroscopic materials. This talk will also include new mechanisms for building artificial cells with DNA molecules. We show that synthetic lipid vesicles with DNA components can not only migrate on 2D surfaces with directional motility, but also coordinate their behaviors with other vesicles. Their collective behaviors emulate biological cell activities such as immune response, thus opening possibilities for new discoveries in fundamental sciences and novel applications in biotechnology. The presentation will be concluded with several exemplary applications.
About the Speaker
Jong Hyun Choi is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Yonsei University, and earned his doctoral degree, also in Mechanical Engineering, in 2005 from the University of California at Berkeley. He completed postdoctoral research in Chemical Engineering at the University of Illinois and MIT before joining Purdue in 2009. He is an ASME fellow and received several prestigious awards including an NSF Career award and a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His research focuses on understanding physics and chemistry of DNA-based materials and devices for various engineering applications.
Host: Professor Kyle Smith & Professor Bumsoo Han