Open Lab Wednesday - DNA Origami

DNA origami is the nanoscale folding of DNA to create non-arbitrary two- and three-dimensional shapes at the nanoscale. The specificity of the interactions between complementary base pairs make DNA a useful construction material, through design of its base sequences. DNA is a well-understood material that is suitable for creating scaffolds that hold other molecules in place or to create structures all on its own. Many potential applications have been suggested, including enzyme immobilization, drug carry capsules, and nanotechnological self-assembly of materials.

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Join OSN's co-founder Scott Pownall as he explores the background of DNA Origami and how these structures are created using CAD software.

caDNAno is an open source software used for creating such structures from DNA. You can download the legacy version of caDNAnano here (http://cadnano.org/legacy) which uses Adobe Air (https://get.adobe.com/air/) on MacOS X or Windows. For MacOSX/linux users can get version 2.5 here (https://github.com/cadnano/cadnano2.5). Watch some caDNAno tutorials on YouTube here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwj-4Wj6PMc) and here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EabqNaYAI7o). Bring your computer and design some DNA origami yourself.

Conceived in the spirit of the VHS's open nights, Open Lab Wednesdays are an opportunity to connect with the lab, meet the people working on project, bring whatever your working on, whatever ideas you have, to an informal meet'n'greet at our lab. Member's are often present doing PCR, pipetting enzymes, having fun. Some Open Lab Wednesdays will have a speaker present a topic of interest to the community or a workshop/demonstration. If you would like to do a talk please email us your ideas at info at opensciencenet dot com. Don't forget to signup on our mailing list (http://www.opensciencenet.org).

There are no requirements for these meetups, just come yourself, meet anyone and everyone involved, learn about potential projects, propose your own, and see our lab as it has evolved until now!

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