Nano-Biomolecular Hybrid Materials

新型工程纳米材料与生物分子的整合为新材料的产生提供了巨大的机会，这些新材料可以促进许多重要的生物医学和纳米工程应用，例如核酸与纳米材料的杂交用于基因治疗和生物传感应用。生产纳米生物分子杂化材料的实验工作大大超过了理解这些材料中的相互作用和杂化材料性质的理论尝试，这对于在特定应用中为其系统设计提供指导是必要的。拟开展的研究项目旨在填补目前理论研究与实际应用之间的空白，(1)短期内研究具有代表性的纳米生物分子杂化材料，提高其在相应应用中的性能；(2)从长远来看，开发有效的建模策略，桥接不同的尺度，可用于表征这些混合材料。

Integration of novel engineered nanomaterials with biological molecules opens the door to tremendous opportunities for the generation of new materials that can facilitate many important biomedical and nanoengineering applications, examples including the hybridization of nucleic acids with nanomaterials for gene therapy and biosensing applications. Experimental efforts on producing nano-biomolecular hybrid materials have significantly outpaced theoretical attempts to understand the interactions in these materials and the properties of the hybrids, which is necessary in order to provide guidelines for their systematic design in specific applications. The proposed research program aims at filling the current gap between theoretical investigation and practical applications by (1) in the short term, studying representative nano-biomolecular hybrid materials to improve their performance in corresponding applications; and (2) in the long term, developing effective modeling strategies bridging different scales that can be used to characterize these hybrid materials.