Penn Arts & Sciences Logo

Friday, September 8, 2017 - 2:00pm

Mark Bathe

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Location

University of Pennsylvania

A6 DRL

Nucleic acids offer a high degree of programmability that enables the synthesis of structured threedimensional molecular architectures that mimic diverse functions of natural protein and nucleic acid assemblies, and the single-molecule interrogation of messenger RNAs and proteins in living systems. In the first part of my seminar I will present work in our group to enable the computational design [1, 2, 3] and synthesis [3, 4] of structured nucleic acid assemblies that mimic viral capsids [3] for high-resolution cellular imaging, metallic nanoparticle synthesis [4], and therapeutic delivery. In the second part of my seminar I will present the application of nucleic acids to perform highly multiplexed fluorescence imaging of neuronal synapse proteins and messenger RNAs [5, 6, 7] towards understanding the molecular basis of psychiatric diseases. Together, these examples will illustrate the application of synthetic nucleic acids, fluorescence imaging, and computation to program and probe complex biomolecular machines.