Hello and welcome back to the newsletter! Feel free to hang out on the slack! We are also on twitter!

All the past podcasts and tutorials can be found here. Enjoy!

  1. Podcast with Prof. Erika DeBenedictis
  2. Week 4: reading group “Revisiting the Classics”
  3. Recruiting: A podcast audio editor!

1. Podcast with Prof. Erika DeBenedictis

This week’s podcast is with Prof. Erika DeBenedictis, a new principal investigator at the Crick Institute in London. Erika is just another one in a long string of podcast guests who has had an unconventional entry into the field of molecular programming! She started her scientific career interested in space science, and her interest was kindled as a child because of the accessibility of this field to anyone. This led her to work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Afterwards she talked about her time as a PhD student in Kevin Esvelt’s lab working on massively parallelised directed evolution, harnessing the power of robotics in order to develop her technique known as PRANCE. She talked about the use of these techniques in expanding the genetic code, and the main hurdles in doing so. We then moved on to her post-doc at David Baker’s lab in Washington, where she worked on using machine learning for de novo protein engineering. At the same time we talked about the place of robots in modern laboratories, whether they will replace all hand pipettes (and wet lab scientists!), and the feasibility of cloud laboratories in making science more accessible. Finally we moved on to the start of Erika’s new lab at the Crick Institute, her vision for what she would want to do, and ultimately the bioautomation challenge, which is a programme spearheaded by her to get bioautomation equipment into more laboratories to accelerate research.

2. Week 4: reading group “Revisiting the Classics”

The reading group “revisiting the classics” is inspired by the special panel session at DNA28, ‘A tribute to Ned Seeman’. We heard how Ned’s paper influenced other researchers, and later development of the DNA Nanotechnology field. Prof. Hao Yan commented that there are a lot of foundational knowledge and interesting ideas in Ned’s early papers. We are currently running a reading group to read seven of Ned Seeman’s papers over seven weeks.

On week 4, we are going to discuss “N.C. Seeman, De Novo Design of Sequences for Nucleic Acid Structure Engineering, Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics 8, 573-581 (1990)”. Please come with thoughts/questions/ideas/whatever in mind, and we will have a gathering and discussion session!

We will have 2 groups. Please pick the one that works for you and register by contacting us.

If there is any question about a specific group (content, zoom link, etc.), feel free to contact the organizers leading that group.

Note that seats will be limited so please sign up as soon as you can! If you later realize that you cannot attend after registering, we kindly ask that please modify your answer. Meeting information (e.g. zoom links) will be sent later to attendees.

Below are the papers for these 7 weeks (list suggested by Prof. Hao Yan):

  1. N.C. Seeman, Nucleic Acid Junctions and Lattices. Journal of Theoretical Biology 99, 237-247 (1982).
  2. B.H. Robinson and N.C. Seeman, The Design of a Biochip: A Self-Assembling Molecular-Scale Memory Device. Protein Engineering 1, 295-300 (1987).
  3. N.C. Seeman, Physical Models for Exploring DNA Topology. Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics 5, 997-1004 (1988).
  4. N.C. Seeman, De Novo Design of Sequences for Nucleic Acid Structure Engineering, Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics 8, 573-581 (1990).
  5. S.M. Du, S. Zhang and N.C. Seeman, DNA Junctions, Antijunctions and Mesojunctions, Biochemistry 31, 10955-10963 (1992).
  6. N.C. Seeman, J. Chen, S.M. Du, J.E. Mueller, Y. Zhang, T.-J. Fu, H. Wang, Y. Wang, and S. Zhang, Synthetic DNA Knots and Catenanes, New Journal of Chemistry 17, 739-755 (1993).
  7. T.-J. Fu and N.C. Seeman, DNA Double Crossover Structures, Biochemistry 32, 3211-3220 (1993)

3. Recruiting: A podcast audio editor!

Are you skilled with audio editing software, enjoy the podcast, and want to help make it even better? Then please get in touch!

Useful Links