Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more

Wyss Institute

Scaling up to a speck of dust

DNA bricks keep getting larger. In 2012, a team of researchers at Harvard described their ability to make self-assembling structures –made completely out of DNA — that were about the size of viruses (80 nanometers across).

Yonggang Ke, PhD

Now they’re scaling up, making bricks that are 1000 times larger and getting close to a size that could be barely visible to the naked eye.

The advances were reported in Nature Chemistry.

Who: a team of researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard led by Peng Yin, and including Yonggang Ke, PhD, now an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

At Emory, Ke and his team are continuing to design 3D DNA machines, with potential functions such as fluorescent nanoantennae, drug delivery vehicles and synthetic membrane channels.

How: The DNA brick method uses short, synthetic strands of DNA that work like interlocking Lego® bricks to build complex structures. Structures are first designed using a computer model of a molecular cube, which becomes a master canvas. Each brick is added or removed independently from the 3D master canvas to arrive at the desired shape. The DNA strands that would match up to achieve the desired structure are mixed together and self assemble — with the help of magnesium salts — to achieve the designed crystal structures.

“Therein lies the key distinguishing feature of our design strategy–its modularity,” Ke says. “The ability to simply add or remove pieces from the master canvas makes it easy to create virtually any design.”

What for: As part of this study the team demonstrated the ability to position gold nanoparticles less than two nanometers apart from each other along the crystal structure — a critical feature for future quantum computational devices and a significant technical advance for their scalable production.

More here.

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Fluorescent jungle gyms made of DNA

The 1966 movie “Fantastic Voyage” presented a vision of the future that includes tiny machines gliding through the body and repairing injuries. Almost 50 years later, scientists are figuring out how to form building blocks for such machines from DNA.

A new paper in Science describes DNA-based polyhedral shapes that are larger and stronger than scientists have built before. Right now, these are just static shapes. But they provide the scaffolding on which scientists could build robot walkers, or cages with doors that open and close. Already, researchers are talking about how such structures could be used to deliver drugs precisely to particular cells or locations in the body.

“Currently DNA self-assembly is perhaps one of the most promising methods for making those nanoscale machines,” says co-author Yonggang Ke, PhD, who recently joined the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University as assistant professor.

The research team was led by Peng Yin, PhD at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Working with the same team, Ke was also first author on a 2012 paper in Science describing “DNA bricks” resembling LEGO® blocks.

In the current paper, the shapes are made up of strut-reinforced tripods, which assemble themselves from individual DNA strands in a process called “DNA origami.” Already, at 5 megadaltons, each tripod is more massive than the largest known single protein (titin, involved in muscle contraction) and more massive than a ribosome, one of the cellular factories in which proteins are made. The tripods in turn can form prism-like structures, 100 nanometers on each side, that begin to approach the size of cellular organelles such as mitochondria.

The prism structures are still too small to see with light microscopes. Because electron microscopy requires objects to be dried and flattened, the researchers used a fluorescence-based imaging technique called “DNA PAINT” to visualize the jungle-gym-like structures in solution.

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DNA is not necessarily the most durable material for building a tiny machine. It is vulnerable to chemical attack, and enzymes inside the body readily chew up DNA, especially exposed ends. However, DNA presents some advantages: it’s easy (and cheap) to synthesize in the laboratory, and DNA base-pairing is selective. In fact, says Ke, these intricate structures assemble themselves: put all the components together in one tube, and all the DNA sequences that are supposed to pair up find each other.DNA polyhedra

Each leg of the tripod is made of 16 DNA double helices, connected together in ways that constrain the structure and make it stiff. The tripods have “sticky ends” that are selective and can assemble into the larger pyramids or prism structures. Previous efforts to build polyhedral structures were like trying to make a jungle gym out of rope: they were too floppy and hard to assemble.

To see the pyramid and prism structures, the research team used the “DNA-PAINT” technique, which uses fluorescent DNA probes that transiently bind to the DNA structures. This method enables visualization of structures that cannot be seen with a conventional light microscope. Why not simply make the DNA structures themselves fluorescent? Because shining strong light on such structures would quickly quench their fluorescence signal.

In his own work in Atlanta, Ke says he plans to further customize the DNA structures, combining the DNA with additional chemistry to add other functional molecules, including proteins or nanoparticles. He is especially interested in developing DNA-based materials that can manipulate or respond to light or carry magnets, with potential biomedical applications such as MRI imaging or targeted drug delivery.

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