Tectosquares

I am writing this blog as I procrastinate writing the final exam for myBioNano class this fall. During the class, student picked current peerreviewed journal articles and presented them in a short Pecha Kuchaformat. This means presenting 20 PPT with 20 sec per slide. Topicsranged from applications of gold nanoparticles for lung cancerdetection, the effects of feeding Buckyballs to mice, and antimicrobialproperties of nanosilver. Students in the class were required to readthe papers chosen by their classmates and write up a list of questions(collected for a grade). I thought the format worked out well. Veryshort presentations followed by fairly animated dialogue (for a 9:30 AMclass).

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

Tectosquares

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