Stetten Lecture on Engineering Novel Biosensors, Oct. 23
Whether animals are looking for food or mates, or avoiding pathogens and predators, they rely on biosensors—molecules that allow animals to sense and respond to their environments. Creating new kinds of biosensors to receive, process and transmit molecular information will be the focus of the 2019 DeWitt Stetten Jr. Lecture, an NIH Director’s Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series event sponsored by NIGMS.
Dr. Christina Dawn Smolke will describe her innovative approaches to designing biomolecules that have applications in diagnostics, drug development, green chemistry and more. Her talk, “Scalable Platforms for Generating RNA Sensors and Controllers,” will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 23, at 3 p.m. in Masur Auditorium, Bldg. 10.
Smolke is a professor of bioengineering and, by courtesy, chemical engineering, at Stanford University. Her lab has created RNA molecules, or switches, that can detect the disease state of a cell and are being further developed for targeted drug delivery. However, in spite of these successes, current means for designing biomolecules remain inefficient and laborious.
To improve the design of biomolecules, Smolke is developing high-throughput methods to obtain information about the biochemical activity of millions of RNA switches in a single experiment. These data are used for producing new computational methods to predict the function of RNA molecules based on their sequence and structure. Smolke’s work may accelerate our ability to rapidly design and build biomolecules for a variety of applications in medicine and environmental conservation.
NIGMS has supported Smolke’s work since 2002. She also has received funding from the National Cancer Institute and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.
The annual DeWitt Stetten Jr. Lecture series was established in 1982 in honor of NIGMS’s third director. The talk is open to all and will be followed by a reception in the NIH Library.
Those who require sign language interpretation or other reasonable accommodation to participate in this event should contact Jacqueline Roberts at jacqueline.roberts@nih.gov (or 301-594-6747) at least 5 days before the lecture.