Research Seminar of Prof.Chad Mirkin and Prof. Milan Mrksich from Northwestern University
Lecture Time: 09:00 on 28th November, 2016
Lecture Room: C502 of Science and Innovation Building
Lecture Title:Unlocking the Materials Genome Through Nanocombinatorix
Chad Mirkin
Abstract
The development of cantilever-free scanning probe techniques has allowed inexpensive, reproducible, and high-throughput patterning of both hard and soft nanomaterials over large areas. Specificallyscanning probe block copolymer lithography (SPBCL) allows one to generate nanoreactors consisting of polymers loaded with metal precursors, which upon thermal treatment can be converted into well-defined nanoparticles. Since one can finely tune both the size and composition of the polymer nanoreactors, nanoparticles of complex compositions can be synthesized with control over size from the 1 to 50 nm length scale. Furthermore, by using 1 million pyramidal pens in a single array, one can probe a wide variety of nanoparticles that systematically vary in size and composition. Nanoparticle libraries made in this manner can be metals, metal oxides, multimetallic alloys, and janus structures. This novel approach lays the foundation for creating new libraries of materials, where scale, in addition to composition becomes an important library parameter.
Biography
Chad Mirkin is the Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and the Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, Chemical and Biological Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and Medicine at Northwestern University. He is known for his discovery and development of spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) and many contributions to nanobiomedicine, nanolithography, supramolecular chemistry, and nanoparticle synthesis. He has authored over 660 manuscripts and over 1,000 patent applications (290 issued worldwide), and he is the founder of multiple companies. Mirkin has received over 100 national and international awards, and at present, he is an Associate Editor of Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Lecture Time: 09:00 on 28th November, 2016
Lecture Room: C502 of Science and Innovation Building
Lecture Title:Combining Arrays and Mass Spectrometry for High Throughput Discovery in Chemistry and Biology
Milan Mrksich
Abstract
This talk will describe an approach for using mass spectrometry to analyze molecular arrays. The arrays are prepared by immobilizing small molecules, proteins, peptides and carbohydrates to self-assembled monolayers of alkanethiolates on gold. This arrays are then treated with reactants-either chemical reagents or enzymes-and then analyzed using the SAMDI technique to identify the masses of substituted alkanethiolates in the monolayer and therefore a broad range of reactivities and post-translational modifications-including kinase, protease, methyltransferase and carbohydrate-directed modifications-and for discovering chemical reactions. This talk will describe applications to high throughput experiments, including the discovery of reactions, the use of carbohydrate arrays to discover novel enzymes, the preparation of peptide arrays to profile the enzyme activities in cell lysates and high-throughput screening to discover novel reactions and small molecular modulators. These examples illustrate the broad capability of the SAMDI method to profile and discover molecular activities in the molecular sciences.
Biography
Milan Mrksich is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor at Northwestern University, with appointments in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, and Cell and Molecular Biology. He also serves as the Founding Director of the Center for Synthetic Biology and as an Associate Director of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center. He earned a BS degree in Chemistry from the University of Illinois and a PhD in Chemistry from Caltech. He then served as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1996. He began his current position at Northwestern in 2011. His many honors include the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the TR100 Innovator Award, Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, election to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the Illinois Bio ICON Innovator Awardee. Professor Mrksich is an active advisor in government and industry. His present and past appointments include the Chair of the Defense Sciences Research Council-an advisory group to the Defense Department-a member of the Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratory, and Chair of the Searle Scholars Advisory Board.
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