Today and tomorrow, we're reporting on presentations at an important conference on Productive Nanosystems: Launching the Technology Roadmap. Chris Phoenix is providing live blog coverage for us...
Next talk: Alexsandr Miklos is speaking on Protein Design and Fabrication Automation.
What they do:
Immobilization and functionalization (turn proteins into sensors)
Capacity to engineer novel function (modify existing proteins)
Rapid protein fabrication (build and test)
Why:
Generate larger datasets (more research knowledge)
Produce technologically useful proteins
He starts from pre-folded (known) structures, then modifies them to get new functions. Proteins can bind almost anything; can be bound to fiber-optic cables to make sensors; can signal by fluorescence or electrochemistry; already, proteins on the end of an optical fiber are in clinical trials as a glucose sensor.
Protein from high-temperature organisms can be stable for months at room temperature.
You can apparently take an existing protein, then modify the "pocket" that binds to molecules, so that it binds to the molecule you're interested in. Alexsandr talks very fast, so it's difficult to follow much less blog. But it seems he has a method for simulating lots of different pocket configurations, winnowing down the possibilities, and evaluating the remainder.
Then it's time to build and test the proteins in the lab. Rather than building DNA strands from scratch, there's a way to use PCR to stitch together smaller snippets. A robot can build a 96-well plate, doing 1440 fluid-handling steps, in 2.5 hours.
There are clever ways to purify proteins that I didn't catch; something about a chemical that binds to a certain sequence of amino acids, Cys-Cys-X-X-Cys-Cys. But once you've built them (which takes only four days) you can almost immediately evaluate them.
This is useful stuff -- a likely enabling technology for bio-based pathways to molecular manufacturing.
Chris Phoenix
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog
Comments