Annual Symposium 2016/17

The 2016/17 symposium of the Department of Molecular Medicine will take place under a new format, namely as a joint symposium with the Department of Biology and Biotechnology and with the CNR Institute of Molecular Genetics.

The symposium will last a full two days from 9.00 am to 6.00 pm on February 14th and 15th in Aula F of Campus aquae (29, via Cascinazza, Pavia).  All departmental members are strongly invited to attend. The full programme of the symposium can be downloaded here. A symposium flyer is also available here. All members of the Department, especially PhD students and post-doctoral fellows, are strongly invited to attend and take an active role in the Symposium.

The guest lecture will be given at 9.00 am on February 15th by Björn Högberg a scientist at the Karolinsla Institute (Stockholm) and is entitled Building Molecular Tools out of DNA. The lecture synopsis and a short biographical sketch are found below.

Lecture Synopsis.
DNA is not only a carrier of genetic information but also an excellent building material for nanoscale engineering. I will present our recent work on ‘3D-printing’ DNA origami, a method that allows full computer aided design and provides a way to make DNA origami nanostructures more accessible to experiments in physiological conditions. The last part is important, because not only are DNA origami structures cool in themselves, they can help us learn important lessons about how biology works on the nanoscale. In my talk I will go through how we use these nanostructures to look at cell-cell signaling and how nanoscale clustering of ligands affects receptor signaling. I will show you how these DNA origami techniques are currently forming the basis for what might possibly become a new era of precise spatial control in biology.

Biographical Sketch.
Björn Högberg is an Associate professor of nanomedicine at the Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics Department at the Karolinska Institute. He got his PhD in physics from Mid Sweden University in 2007 and did his post-doc at the Harvard Mecial School in Boston the following years. Since late 2010 he has been leading a research group at the Karolinska in Stockholm. He is a leader in the field of DNA nanotechnology and in particular their biological research applications. Since starting his own lab he has consistently published with high impact and was recently awarded with several prestigious grants including a Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation Academy Fellows and an ERC consolidator.

Selected publications
[1] Benson E, Mohammed A, Gardell J,  Masich S, Czeizler E, Orponen P and Högberg B, DNA rendering of polyhedral meshes at the nanoscale,  Nature, 523 p. 441 (2015)