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Biological Design

FREE

for Members

Biological Design

Friday, December 3, 2010

The New York Academy of Sciences

Presented By

 

The Biological Design: Fourth Annual Advances in Biomolecular Engineering Symposium will highlight the recent advances in both protein and nucleic acid engineering, specifically focusing on innovative approaches to tailor molecules with unique functions and architectures. This symposium is highly interdisciplinary and will bring together recognized scientists and engineers who are performing cutting-edge research with core knowledge in physical sciences and engineering. An important goal of this symposium is to highlight the research advances in molecular engineering from academic, government, and industrial institutions by convening and promoting the exchange of ideas. There will be a poster session at the symposium, providing individuals the opportunity to present their research and interact with meeting attendees.

Presented by



 

Agenda

*Presentation times are subject to change.


8:30 AM

Registration and Poster Set-up

9:00 AM

For sponsorship opportunities contact Brooke Grindlinger at brindlinger@nyas.org or call 212.298.8625

9:10 AM

Recent Progress in Molecular Computing and Robotics
Milan Stojanovic, PhD, Columbia University

9:55 AM

Bio-Enabled Design and Assembly of Materials
Rajesh R. Naik PhD, Air Force Research Laboratory, Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, Wright-Patterson AFB

10:40 AM

Refreshments and Poster Viewing

11:00 AM

Agricultural Biotechnology: Protein and System Design in the Plant Kingdom
Sonya J. Franklin, PhD, Monsanto Company

11:45 AM

Coupling Evolutionary Concepts with Rational Protein Design
Birte Höcker, PhD, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology

12:30 PM

Lunch and Poster Session

2:00 PM

Selection of Novel Cell Penetrating Peptides Using Plasmid Display
Scott Banta, PhD, Columbia University

2:45 PM

Synthetic Biosynthesis: Generating Pathways for Nucleoside Analogs
Brian Bachmann, PhD, Vanderbilt University

3:30 PM

Refreshments and Poster Viewing

3:50 PM

Information-Rich Sequences from Replicating Systems
Irene Chen, MD, PhD, Harvard University

4:35 PM

Closing Remarks

4:45 PM

Refreshments and Poster Session

Speakers

Organizers

Ronald Koder, PhD

The City College of New York/CUNY

Jin K. Montclare, PhD

Polytechnic Institute of New York University

Jin Ryoun Kim, PhD

Polytechnic Institute of New York University

Vikas Nanda, PhD

Rutgers University

Speakers

Brian Bachmann, PhD

Vanderbilt University

Brian O. Bachmann is the sole Principal Investigator of the Vanderbilt Laboratory for Biosynthetic Studies (VLBS). The research program comprising the VLBS concerns itself with problems in secondary metabolism, both natural and anthropogenic. Research in the laboratory is thematically divided into three subgroups 1) Deconstructive biosynthesis, how life makes secondary metabolites, 2) Constructive biosynthesis, how to coopt the biochemistry of life to synthesize unnatural secondary metabolites and 3)Biosynthesis discovery, the discovery of previously unknown secondary metabolites. Prior to joining the faculty of Vanderbilt Department of Chemistry in Nashville Tennessee, Brian was Director of Chemistry of Ecopia Biosciences, a drug discovery company in Montreal, QC. Brian received his PhD in Chemistry from The Johns Hopkins University.

Scott Banta, PhD

Columbia University

Scott Banta PhD is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University. He received his BSE degree from the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and his MS and PhD degrees from the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at Rutgers University. He did a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Martin Yarmush at the Shriners and Massachusetts General Hospitals and Harvard Medical School. He began his faculty career in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University in 2004 and his research has focused on the engineering of proteins and peptides that exhibit controllable and dynamic conformational behavior and the application of these systems in areas including bioelectrocatalysis, biomaterials, gene and drug delivery, biosensing, and bioenergy.

Irene Chen, MD, PhD

Harvard University

Irene Chen is a Bauer Fellow at the FAS Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University. Her current research focuses on emergence and evolution in biochemical systems. She received an MD-PhD in biophysics from Harvard in 2007, studying simple membrane systems.

Sonya J. Franklin, PhD

Monsanto Company

Sonya Franklin joined Monsanto in January of 2007, after nine years on the faculty of the University of Iowa. She received her PhD degree in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley working on lanthanide MRI contrast agents. Her interests continued to drift more biological, so following graduate school, she took a NIH-funded postdoctoral position at the California Institute of Technology working on metallointercalators in DNA. In 1998, she began her independent career in the Chemistry Department at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where she received tenure in 2004. Her research at Iowa comprised several interrelated projects in bioinorganic chemistry, with the major focus of the lab on de novo metalloprotein design. When she was approached with the opportunity to do structure, function, and design at Monsanto, she left her academic career to pursue these passions in a different context. In 2009, she became the Protein Technologies Program Director, leading a team focused on protein characterization, design, and optimization of novel protein leads.

Birte Höcker, PhD

Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology

Birte Höcker received her Diplom in biology from Göttingen University (1999), earned her PhD in biochemistry at Köln University (2003), and carried out postdoctoral studies on computational protein design at Duke University Medical Center. Since 2006 she is a group leader at the MPI for Developmental Biology in Tübingen. Her research interests focus on the evolution and the design of protein folds and functions.

Rajesh R. Naik, PhD

Air Force Research Laboratory, Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, Wright-Patterson AFB

Rajesh R. Naik is the Technology Advisor and Research Group Lead at the Nanostructured and Biological Materials Branch (Materials and Manufacturing Directorate) at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson AFB, OH. He received his PhD degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Carnegie Mellon University. He has authored over 120 peer-reviewed publications and has several patents and awards. His research interests include engineered biomaterials, biosensors, bioelectronics and bionanotechnology. He is currently an adjunct Professor at Wright State University (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department) and at Georgia Tech (Department of Materials Science and Engineering). He was recently elected as SPIE Fellow in 2009.

Milan Stojanovic, PhD

Columbia University School of Medicine

Milan Stojanovic studied chemistry in Belgrade (Serbia), Boston (MA), and NYC (NY). His current research interest is best described as research on "not what molecules are doing, but what molecules should be doing".

 

Sponsors

For sponsorship opportunities contact Brooke Grindlinger at brindlinger@nyas.org or call 212.298.8625

Presented by

Abstracts

Recent Progress in Molecular Computing and Robotics

Milan Stojanovic, PhD, Columbia University

I will start simple, with nucleic acids that cleave other nucleic acids. These elementary units can be used for engineering molecular mixtures displaying complex behaviors. Some of these behaviors are "game-playing" and I will discuss the potential of molecular mixtures to be taught to play various strategies of a game.

Bio-Enabled Design and Assembly of Materials

Rajesh R. Naik PhD, Air Force Research Laboratory, Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, Wright-Patterson AFB

Biological systems exemplify the utilization of specific processes with a diverse set of building blocks for the synthesis and assembly of precisely defined functional material. These bio-blocks (nucleic acids, peptides/proteins, viruses, and antibodies) as organizational elements provide new and exciting opportunities in developing new classes of materials, processes and devices. These organizational elements can be used to template and organize materials and create functional materials for a variety of applications. In my talk, I will describe our work on the selection, design, characterization, applications, and challenges associated with these designer biomolecules.

Agricultural Biotechnology: Protein and System Design in the Plant Kingdom

Sonya J. Franklin, PhD, Monsanto Company

The talk will provide context for Bioengineering work in the Ag Biotech sector. The discussion will include how crop plants are engineered to contain enhanced traits, and examples of how structural and biophysical characterization, system engineering, and protein design are employed to optimize protein leads and drive product advancement.

Coupling Evolutionary Concepts with Rational Protein Design

Birte Höcker, PhD, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology

The complex and highly functional proteins that we observe today must have evolved from simpler and less specialized subunits. We have applied the concept of combinatorial assembly and fragment recruitment to construct new well-folded proteins from stable fragments. Altogether this modular assembly approach enables new combinations of functional properties encoded in fold fragments. It further demonstrates how new proteins can quickly develop and be competitive in today’s protein world.

Selection of Novel Cell Penetrating Peptides Using Plasmid Display

Scott Banta, PhD, Columbia University

Cell Penetrating Peptides (CPPs) have received a great deal of attention since they have the ability to deliver various functional cargos to cells and tissues. However, the use of CPPs in the clinic has been hampered by a lack of stability, specificity, and a full understanding of their mechanism of action. We have developed a novel plasmid display platform for the new selection of functional CPPs from randomized libraries. We have recently identified a new CPP that is markedly different from other known CPPs, and we have demonstrated that it can deliver a cell-killing domain to primary cells in culture.

Synthetic Biosynthesis:  Generating Pathways for Nucleoside Analogs

Brian Bachmann, PhD,Vanderbilt University

Using a combination of structure-based enzyme redesign and directed evolution methodologies, along with a novel biosynthetic pathway construction paradigm, we have developed E. coli based microbial pathways capable of producing two synthetic nucleoside analogs, dideoxyinosine (Didanosine) and Ribavirin monophosphate.

Information-Rich Sequences from Replicating Systems

Irene Chen, MD, PhD, Harvard University

The complexity of a replicating system is limited by the amount of information it can carry. How might rudimentary replicators arise in chemical systems? Using experiments and modeling, we describe how chemical mechanisms could enable the emergence of information-rich sequences.

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