First Three PhD Students Graduate

Drs. Shaobo Li (李少博)Zhuo Chen (陈茁), and Madushani Dharmarwardana (මාධුෂානි ධර්මවර්ධන) were hooded as the first three PhD students to emerge from the group. They’ve left big shoes to fill and set a pace for productivity and dedication to hard work and good science that will hopefully last for a long time. Best of luck to the first three!

Michael does DIY Drug Delivery & Shaobo (李少博) does MOFs on Bioconjugted Viruses

The group has been busy and hitting it big in the popular media. Michael Luzuriaga in collaboration with the Smadone Lab next
door put out a method to make microneedle drug delivery patches using 3D printing. Cheap 3D printing using the FDA approved thermoplastic poly-lactic acid. The group shows reversible sorption of small molecules and release into pig skin. You can read more about it in the various writeups in popular media or the group’s original report in either ChemRxiv or the hyperlinks on our publication page that go out to its final home in Lab on a Chip.

A second paper, this time by Shaobo Li (李少博), brings a structure-function understanding to the core-shell
growth of MOFs onto proteins—in particular, ZIF-8. The paper was accepted by four reviewers without change (!!), is an ACS Editor’s Choice, open access, and will appear on the cover of ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. This is a real testament to Shaobo’s qualities as a scientist since his first paper on Viruses in MOFs in Angewandte was also accepted without changes!

New Members!

The group officially welcomes two new grad students! Olivia Brohlin, who received her BS from UT Austin and Arezoo Sharivarkevishahi, from Shiraz University in Iran!

Crikey! Convection Curls Clever Crystal Cantilever Contraption in Chem Comm!

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!

Zhuo Chen (陈茁) Bioconjugates Her Way to the ACS in DC

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.