The Gassengang
Candace Benjamin has scored a grant to attend the 43rd annual conference of The National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE) in Raleigh, North Carolina. She will presenting her preliminary work on photoactivation of viral capsids.
Dr. Jeremiah Gassensmith was invited to give a talk at the 2016 MOF YI symposium over the work the group has been doing with virus encapsulated MOF architectures.
We trapped the Tobacco Mosaic Virus in a Metal Organic Framework and published it in Angewandte! Inside the MOF, the virus become much more resilient against denaturation, even surviving boiling water and pure methanol solvent. After these harsh treatments, we were able to gently exfoliate the virus with EDTA to get the virus back. The effort was lead by first year graduate student Shaobo Li, who spent almost 18 months working out the conditions necessary to coat 100% of the virus inside the porous ZIF-8. Madushani Dharmarwardana found that the surface of the virus was still reactive, showing mass transport of small molecules through the pores. The Smaldone grouphelped with the physical characterization and the Chan lab lent us Ren and the PXRD.
Doxorubicin is released using light from the surface of bacteriophage Qβ and shows very little toxicity in the dark but is quite effective when activated. To achieve the low “dark toxicity” however, required development of a method to modify the capsid at a second site in an orthogonal fashion. Zhuo Chen, Na Li, Luxi Chen and Jiyong Lee contributed.
Madushani Dharmawardana has been awarded a Travel Award from the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre to attend the 2016 American Crystallographic Association’s annual meeting in Denver. Congrats Madushani!
First year student Hamilton Lee won UTD’s Eric Moore Scholarship, a merit based scholarship that goes toward his stipend. Congrats Hamilton!
Our recent review in WIRES Nanomedicine and Nanobiotechnology was highlighted on Wiley’s ChemistryViews website.
Welcome Candace Benjamin and Hamilton Lee!