Just read a great article regarding current nanopore research – Nanopore Traffic Control.
Also, started reading U.S. patent 5,795,782 that was filed in 1995 and issued in 1998. The co-inventors include George Church and it is believed that this was the first patent application for nanopore technology. The issued patent can be downloaded from Google at this link.
Live at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ebling Symposium Center, Room 1220: Who should attend? Carbohydrate Chemists, Synthetic Chemists, Glycobiologists, Pharmaceutical Scientists, and those interested in automated synthesis or carbohydrate-based vaccines
Carbohydrates on the surface of cells are involved in a host of fundamental biological processes. While peptides and oligonucleotides are now readily accessible using automated solid phase synthesis, access to complex carbohydrates has been very difficult and time consuming. Professor Seeberger is a pioneer and leading authority in automated oligosaccharide synthesis. In this presentation, he will describe the development of a fully integrated platform based on automated oligosaccharide synthesis and carbohydrate arrays to address biological problems. Particular emphasis will be placed on the latest version of the automated synthesis platform that is currently being made available to laboratories around the world. Rest
BERKELEY — Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have turned a benign virus into an engineering tool for assembling structures that mimic collagen, one of the most important structural proteins in nature. The process they developed could eventually be used to manufacture materials with tunable optical, biomedical and mechanical properties.
The researchers, led by Seung-Wuk Lee, UC Berkeley associate professor of bioengineering and faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), describe their “self-templating material assembly” process in the Oct. 20 issue of the journal Nature. Rest
MOSCOW and LONDON, September 12, 2011 /PRNewswire/ –
- Anglo/Russian Venture Will Have Important Humanitarian Objectives From Day 1
Pro Bono Bio™ is a new international pharmaceutical company that launched today. Pro Bono Bio is the result of a three year Anglo/Russian project, developed by Celtic Pharma Holdings in London. Pro Bono Bio has ambitious growth targets that will allow it to support a unique humanitarian mission. Pro Bono Bio combines global pharma expertise from the UK with international capital and matched funding from the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies (RUSNANO).
Pro Bono Bio is the first pharmaceutical company to have clear and specific humanitarian objectives from Day 1. Pro Bono Bio’s products will be priced in different geographic areas based on the region’s ability to pay. Importantly, Pro Bono Bio’s business model includes the provision of free drug donations to Africa based on the sales of its products at normal prices in the pharmaceutical markets of Western Europe. Pro Bono Bio’s shareholders are fully supportive of this unique approach.
British Prime Minister David Cameron commenting on the launch of Pro Bono Bio said “This is a great example of UK- Russia collaboration at the cutting edge of R&D. It demonstrates how British businesses can work together with their Russian counterparts to expand into new areas, creating jobs and prosperity here in the UK.” Rest
Representative Mike Honda (D-CA) re-introduced on August 1, 2011, the Nanotechnology Advancement and New Opportunities Act (NANO Act), which seeks to promote the development and responsible stewardship of nanotechnology in the U.S. According to Rep. Honda, the legislation is designed to maintain the U.S.’s leadership role in nanotechnology research by promoting the development and commercialization of the results. At the same time, the NANO Act addresses concerns raised about the potential health and safety risks associated with nanotechnology. Rest of this post at the Nanotechnology Law Blog
A tip of the hat to my friend Jack Pringle who is one of the authors at SCBusinessLawBlog.com. Given that so much bio-medical innovation is occurring in close connection with the latest advances in nanotechnology, I respectfully suggest that Representative Honda rename the act the BIONANO Act for the Bio-medical Innovative Organizations and Nanotechnology Advancement and New Opportunities Act!
St. Petersburg, Russia, June 16, 2011 — RUSNANO, the Korean Ministry of Knowledge Economy’s Korea Institute for the Advancement of Technology (KIAT), Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), the St. Petersburg Government, 360ip and Samho Green Investment Venture Capital (SGIVC) announced today the formation of the Asia Nanotechnology Fund (the Fund).
The parties entered into a Memorandum of Understanding today as part of the St. Petersburg World Economic Forum. Rest at RUSNANO
The bacterial flagellum is a self-assembling filament, which bacteria use for swimming. It is built from tens of thousands of flagellin monomers in a self-assembly process involving translocation of the monomers through the flagellar interior, a channel, to the growing tip. Each monomer is pumped into the filament at the base, translocates unfolded along the channel and then binds to the tip of the filament, thereby extending the growing flagellum. Rest
Over at “genomes unzipped” Luke Jostins has an interesting post entitled Cluster Sequencing with Oxford Nanopore’s GridION System. [excerpt] Oxford Nanopore is clearly aiming big here; the imagine in the video (to the right) shows a “nanopore cluster” with about 300 individual nodes, which would be a tens-of-million pounds facility. It looks like they aren’t pitching this as a “complementary technology”, sitting alongside existing machines, but as a “take over the major sequencing centers” technology.
GenomeWeb’s Andrea Anderson has an interesting post entitled Sequencing Study Offers Clues to Resistance Patterns in Pneumococcal Bacteria [excerpt] Because isolates turning up in different parts of the world at different times seem to have independently developed certain antibiotic resistance mechanisms, the researchers noted, it appears that selective pressure exercised by antibiotics has led to convergent adaptations in S. pneumoniae.
Templating: Small templates and building blocks combine to make extra-large structures
A circular templating approach yields 4.7-nm-diameter macrocycles from small, easily prepared templates, reports a group of British researchers (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09683).
The method is based on Vernier complexes, which are precise assemblies generated by the coming together of components with different numbers of binding sites—for example, different four- and six-membered building blocks. Past experiments with Vernier systems, however, have all involved linear complexes. In the new work, a group led by Harry L. Anderson, a chemistry professor at Oxford University, experimented with radial templates and linear building blocks to produce 12-membered porphyrin nanorings.
Realizing that Vernier complexes can be circular “is a significant step forward in the science of template-directed synthesis,” says J. Fraser Stoddart, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University. The technique should enable and ease the preparation of macromolecules with consistent size and shape, he adds.
Anderson and coworkers used a circular hexapyridyl template with six binding sites. They combined the template with four-membered zinc porphyrin chains, with the porphyrins linked by butadiyne groups. Three porphyrin tetramers can bind around and occupy all of the binding sites on two of the templates, linking the two in the process. The researchers then oxidatively coupled the template-bound porphyrin tetramers to form a figure-eight compound. Dissociating the porphyrins from the templates produced a 12-membered, π-conjugated porphyrin nanoring, among the largest of similar macrocycles ever synthesized. … rest