Month: August 2017

Madushani Dharmarwardana and Raymond Welch have just published a paper in Chemical Communications showing thermal actuation in a single crystal. This is cool because the actuation is powered by a single-crystal to single-crystal phase transition (a monoclinic to triclinic phase transition) that accompanies an enormous change in unit cell. When glued to a glass plate, this anisotropic change causes the crystal to lift away from the heat. We show that the single crystals can lift almost 100 times their weight!

Also, check out the press release on the topic from UTD!

Good news from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas! The group has been awarded a grant to conduct “High Risk High Reward” research looking at how VLPs can be used in the course of cancer treatment. The work will be carried out jointly between UT Dallas and UT Southwestern and will mark our first project funded to conduct work at UT Southwestern.

Zhuo Chen (陈茁) had a very productive summer indeed! Having just published a second time in the journal Small with the brilliant Qin group here at UT Dallas, she moved fast to wrap up a manuscript, which just appeared in the journal Bioconjugate Chemistry, entitled “Fluorescent Functionalization Across Quaternary Structure in a Virus-Like Particle.” In it, she demonstrated the considerable substrate scope of the Haddleton-Baker reaction* on the virus-like particle (VLP) Qβ (Qbeta). Not only that, she showed the resulting particle was brigly fluorescent and could be monitored in cells. We also discuss some of the problems with this in vitro monitoring and ways to turn these problems into opportunities.

THEN she won an award to present her work from the Fall 2017 Graduate Student Symposium Planning Committee, funded by Bioconjugate Chemistry, at the ACS National Meeting in Washington DC! Keep an eye out for her interview, which will appear in Bioconjugate Chemistry.

^{*That may not be a named reaction, though it should be, and we are going to start using it in subsequent papers.}