17.15 Uhr im Seminarraum 1.27 Von-Danckelmann-Platz 4, 06120 Halle
Fraunhofer-Institut für Zelltherapie und Immunologie, DNA Nanodevices Gruppe, Leipzig, Deutschland
“Bottom-up Engineering of Nanoscale Devices to Program Macroscopic Material Properties”
Abstract
Biological materials are often used as inspiration in the design of new synthetic or bio-hybrid materials; however, the molecular toolbox provided by biological systems has been evolutionarily optimized to carry out the necessary functions of cells. The resulting inability to systematically modify fundamental properties such as polymer stiffness or the association strength of crosslinking proteins in experimentally available model systems hinders a meticulous examination of the connection between molecular parameter space and resulting properties of bulk assemblies. We circumvent these limitations using model systems based on synthetically produced building blocks such as DNA strands and peptides, which are programmable on the molecular scale.
In one example, micrometer-long nanotubes with tunable diameters and rigidity can be constructed from small sets of short, DNA oligonucleotides. By systematically varying the set of DNA strands of these synthetic, semiflexible filaments, their micron-scale persistence length (Lp) can be precisely tuned. […]
