SIMULATION TOOLS FOR BIOTECHNOLOGICAL NANODEVICES

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. This development project deals with the application of biotechnological nanodevices made from or working in conjunction with biological materials to solve a diverse set of technological problems, leading to new ways to understand biology and diagnose or treat disease. Engineering such devices often requires the testing of many prototypes before the best solution is found for a particular problem. Computer modeling provides a means for evaluating many potential designs, so that only the most promising need to be physically built and tested. The Resource has focused on several areas of biotechnological nanodevice simulation (http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/Categories/Nano/). Methods for visualizing and modeling silicon bionanodevices, for example, will allow the techniques used in fabricating computer chips to be employed in building bio-electronic sensors. Such sensors could be produced cheaply, providing an inexpensive method to implement electronic ``tweezers'' for examining single molecules. Another promising technology is the use of carbon nanotubes, which are synthetic materials with properties that enable their use for in vivo sensing, e.g., of the action of agents used in chemotherapy of cancers. However, simulating devices and materials such as these can be a prohibitively expensive computational undertaking. Accordingly, the Resource is pursuing coarse-grained methods for simulating synthetic materials such as detergents, nanotubes, and silica, which will open up new opportunities for modeling new nanodevice designs [1].