I am writing this blog as I procrastinate writing the final exam for my
BioNano class this fall. During the class, student picked current peer
reviewed journal articles and presented them in a short Pecha Kucha
format. This means presenting 20 PPT with 20 sec per slide. Topics
ranged from applications of gold nanoparticles for lung cancer
detection, the effects of feeding Buckyballs to mice, and antimicrobial
properties of nanosilver. Students in the class were required to read
the papers chosen by their classmates and write up a list of questions
(collected for a grade). I thought the format worked out well. Very
short presentations followed by fairly animated dialogue (for a 9:30 AM
class).

Since the students chose the articles, some were very familiar to me but some were quite unexpected. One of the more
interesting topics that I learned about was making tectosquares that
are RNA sequences that self assemble into ladder-like nanostructures.
In the paper listed below, they used nanogold particles to quantify the
spacing. Very Elegant.
Controlled Spacing of Cationic Gold Nanoparticles by Nanocrown RNA
Alexey Y. Koyfman,§,† Gary Braun,§ Sergei Magonov,‡ Arkadiusz Chworos,§
Norbert O. Reich,§,† and Luc Jaeger*,§,† J. AM. CHEM. SOC. 2005, 127,
11886-11887