Nov 25, 2016
BIOTEC team awarded with gold project at BIOMOD
Team I, nanobot. From left to right: Timothy Esch, Shikhar Gupta, Dr. Braun, Renat Nigmetzianov, Dmitry Beliaev (top); Yara Alsadaawi, Foram Joshi, Judit Clopés and Juliana Hilliard (bottom).
A team formed by eight students of the master programs Molecular Bioengineering and Nanobiophysics (BIOTEC, Technische Universität Dresden) and supervised by the research group leader Dr. Hans-Georg Braun (IPF) was awarded with the gold project category in the 2016 edition of BIOMOD. This edition was celebrated during the weekend of the 29th and the 30th October and took place in the University of California, in San Francisco (United States of America).
BIOMOD is an annual biomolecular design competition for students organised by the Wyss Institute. 30 teams from all over the world participate by designing and developing a project. This involves finding financial support and publishing the results in a website, a live presentation and a short video, apart from performing experiments. Teams from Dresden Dresden DNAmic (2014), Dresden Nanormous (2013), and Dresden Nanosaurs (2012) were also successful in previous editions of this contest. This year’s edition was won by Tiny Trap, a team from the University of New South Wales, in Australia.
The project developed by the team “I, nanobot” consisted of a micro-sized device capable of transport and deliver a cargo in a controlled manner. It was the result of linking a magnetic Dynabead®, which allows the external control of the movement with a variable magnetic field, to a vesicle for the transportation and delivery of the cargo. The linkage of these two functional parts was achieved using DNA origami technique. Targeted drug delivery and biosensing are some of the possible applications that this device might have in the fields of medicine and molecular biology.
Further information: https://inanobotdresden.github.io/index.html