NanoEngineering Professor and "Nanoburrs"

Liangfang Zhang, the second author on the "nanoburr" paper in last week's PNAS that has received alot of attention is now a professor in the Department of NanoEngineering at the Jacobs School.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School have built targeted nanoparticles that can cling to artery walls and slowly release medicine, an advance that potentially provides an alternative to drug-releasing stents in some patients with cardiovascular disease.

The particles, dubbed “nanoburrs” because they are coated with tiny protein fragments that allow them to stick to target proteins, can be designed to release their drug payload over several days. They are one of the first such targeted particles that can precisely home in on damaged vascular tissue, says Omid Farokhzad, associate professor at Harvard Medical School and an author of a paper describing the nanoparticles in the Jan. 18 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The MIT nanoburr press release (excerpted above) is here.

More information from MIT on the nanoburr research is here.

The paper is here (PNAS site license may be required)

Chan, J.; Zhang, L.; Tong, R.; Ghosh, D.; Gao, W.; Liao, G.; Yuet, K.; Gray, D.; Rhee, J-W.; Cheng, J.; Golomb, G.; Libby, P.; Langer, R.; Farokhzad, O. C. "Spatiotemporal controlled delivery of nanoparticles to injured vasculature", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2010.

Bioengineering Grad Student Research Covered by BBC, Published in Nature

The BBC described the UC San Diego findings published this week in the journal Nature highlighting microbial "group blink" that could lead to new kinds of environmental sensors. The work is also a interesting step forward in the world of synthetic biology. A pair of bioengineering graduate students from the Jacobs School of Engineering worked on this project: Tal Danino and Octavio Mondragon.

The original UCSD press release by Kim McDonald is here.

The video is here.

My blog post yesterday about this work is here.

Undergraduate Engineering Diversity Professional Organizations at the Jacobs School Honored

Congratulations to the Jacobs School’s undergraduate chapters of the National Society of Black Engineers, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and the Society of Women Engineers. This trio of undergraduate engineering diversity professional organizations won a 2009 UC San Diego Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action and Diversity Award.

The program recognizes individuals, departments and organizational units who have made outstanding contributions in support of UC San Diego’s commitment to diversity.

A ceremony will be held on Tuesday, February 9, 2010, at 2:00 p.m. at the Price Center West Ballrooms to recognize all of the 2009 Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action and Diversity Awards Recipients.

More info on each of the winning student organizations is below:

UCSD Chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers
NSBE offers its members leadership training, professional development, mentoring opportunities, career placement services and more. NSBE’s mission is to increase the number of culturally responsible Black engineers who excel academically, succeed professionally, and positively impact the community.

UCSD Chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers
The UCSD SHPE chapter provides a medium in which Hispanic/Latino students studying engineering at the Jacobs School can network with other Hispanic engineers in the area. In addition to networking opportunities, the UCSD SHPE Chapter provides a way for students to receive tips and encouragement to excel academically and professionally, as well as opportunities for students to give back to others through community service and outreach.

UCSD Chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE)
The Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD enrolls many of the brightest, hardest-working students in the country. We know the most valuable engineer in the workplace is a well-rounded, resourceful one. The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) plays an important role in the development of such an engineer. We provide many activities and events to aid our members in achieving these goals.

Here is a list of many of the engineering-related student organizations at the Jacobs School:

More info on the Web story on the Jacobs School Web site.

Group Blink: Synchronized Genetic Clock in journal Nature

"Quorum sensing" rocks. No, it's not about trying to figure out if there are enough people at your homeowner's association meeting to vote to outlaw large makeshift greenhouses on the front lawn..."quorum sensing" is one of the keys to a new genetic clock that bioengineering graduate students from the Jacobs School (Tal Danino and Octavio Mondragon) helped create. Quorum sensing has to do with engineered bacteria "talking" to each other and then blinking in unison. This group blink is the next big step in a long line of research breakthroughs that could one day lead to bacteria that serve as sensors that blink when a poison appears in the environment.

Watch the video here.

Read the full UC San Diego press release (written by my colleague Kim McDonald) here...the first few paragraphs are pasted below:

Researchers at UC San Diego who last year genetically engineered bacteria to keep track of time by turning on and off fluorescent proteins within their cells have taken another step toward the construction of a programmable genetic sensor. The scientists recently synchronized these bacterial “genetic clocks” to blink in unison and engineered the bacterial genes to alter their blinking rates when environmental
conditions change.

Their latest achievement, detailed in a paper published in the January 21 issue of the journal Nature, is a crucial step in creating genetic sensors that might one day provide humans with advance information about temperature, poisons and other potential hazards in the environment by monitoring changes in the bacterium’s blinking rates. Watch a video showing the UCSD team’s blinking genetic clocks here.

“Programming living cells is one defining goal of the new field of synthetic biology,” said Jeff Hasty, associate professor of biology and bioengineering at UCSD who headed the research team with Lev Tsimring, associate director of UCSD’s BioCircuits Institute.

UCSD Global TIES Haiti Earthquake Relief Campaign

Below is an excerpt of an open letter from Mandy Bratton, Ph.D. Director, Global TIES at the Jacobs School.

I know that many of you have been moved, as I have, by the stories and images emerging from Haiti in the wake of last week’s devastating earthquake. We all want to do something to help. Rest assured that Global TIES intends to help Haiti rebuild itself, once it is safe and appropriate for us to be on the
ground.

In the meantime, the best way to help is through financial contributions. Immediate medical aid is urgently needed to stem the death toll from this disaster. To this end, Global TIES has teamed up with Partners in Health, a non-governmental organization co-founded by Dr. Paul Farmer that has been providing healthcare in Haiti for the past 25 years. (To learn more about Dr. Farmer and his groundbreaking work, read “Mountains Beyond Mountains” by Tracy Kidder.)

Global TIES has created a fund-raising page on the Partners in Health web site: http://act.pih.org/page/outreach/view/haitiearthquake/ucsdglobalties.

Please join me in giving what you can via this web site. Partners in Health has agreed to track contributions made from UC San Diego via this site, so if you are part of the UC San Diego community, please include your UCSD email address on your donation form. All proceeds will go to Partners in Health.

http://act.pih.org/page/outreach/view/haitiearthquake/ucsdglobalties

Folow Global TIES on Facebook and Twitter

NanoEngineers Use DNA to Place Nano Scale Materials

NanoEngineering professor Jennifer Cha recently published new work on using biomolecules, such as DNA and proteins, to engineer the orientation and placement of nano scale materials into the desired device architectures that are reproducible in high yields and at low costs.

The paper titled “Large Area Spatially Ordered Arrays of Gold Nanoparticles Directed by Lithographically Confined DNA Origami,” appeared in Nature Nanotechology.

“Self-assembled structures are often too small and affordable lithographic patterns are too large,” said Albert Hung, lead author of the Nature Nanotechnology paper and a post doc working in Cha’s Biomolecular Materials and Nanoscale Assembly Lab. “But rationally designed synthetic DNA nanostructures allow us to access length scales between 5 and 100 nanometers and bridge the two systems."

This story recently appeared as the top news story on Semiconductor Online.

Healthy Desk Life...it takes some effort

Screen time, computer time, desk time, study time, writing time, Facebooking time...so much of our lives now take place in front of the computer. And it can take its tool.

A friend here on campus recently sent me a link to various ergonomic resources provided by UCSD. Check them out...you'll be glad you did.

http://blink.ucsd.edu/safety/occupational/ergonomics/fund/stretches.html

By the way...way back in 2009, I linked to a Calit2 project called "Active Desk" to make "treadmill workstations" safe and affordable. (Tiffany Fox's full Calit2 story is here.)