Tuesday, 03 November, 2015
LMU team Nanocandy wins 2nd prize in the BIOMOD 2015 competition!
Congratulations!
BIOMOD is an annual biomolecular design competition for students. Undergraduate teams compete to build the coolest stuff using the molecules of life. Previous winners have used DNA, RNA, and proteins as building blocks to create autonomous robots, molecular computers, and prototypes for nanoscale therapeutics. Students lead projects each summer and then travel to Harvard in early November to present their work and win awards.
This year, the LMU BIOMOD team Nanocandy (Luzia Kilwing, Jonathan Wagner, Chaochen Lu, Maximilian Schiff) won the second prize of the competition and additionally, the prize for the best presentation.
Carbohydrates play an important role in every biological process. Especially in cells, carbohydrates perform a crucial function concerning cell recognition and growth. It is clear that the origin of many diseases can be ascribed to a defective or missing recognition process like it is the case with tumour cells. As there are many different proteins on the cell surface, the so called lectins, which are responsible for the specific identification of carbohydrates, it is of great interest to investigate more about the lectin-carbohydrate interaction. Little is known about that so far. Using the DNA-Origami technique the team is developing a basic research tool in order to further investigate the binding behaviour mentioned above.
Nanocandy website