Lecture: Surprising Physics of Nanopore Transport
Speaker: Professor Aleksei Aksimentiev
Time: 9:00 Am April 26th, 2019
Address: Nangao Hall, Building of Mechanics
Lecture Introduction:
Transport of molecules through nanoscale pores is a process fundamental to the biology of all living organisms and a key element of many technological processes. Driven by diffusion, electrophoresis, or direct mechanical pulling, the transport can be highly selective and is regulated through a variety of mechanisms, including steric exclusion, electrostatic trapping and dehydration. In this lecture, I will review our discovery of new mechanisms that can govern transport of biomolecules to and through nanoscale pores. I will describe how the physical insights uncovered through computer simulations can be applied to block nanoscale transport in the absence of physical gates, to deliver biomolecules for nanopore sensing and to kill cancer cells.
About the Speaker:
Prof. Aleksei Aksimentiev received his Master's degree in physics from the Ivan Franko Lviv State University, Lviv, Ukraine, and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Warsaw, Poland. After a brief postdoctoral training at Mitsui Chemicals, Japan, he joined the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group, Urbana, IL, as a postdoctoral research associate. In 2005, he became a faculty member of the Physics Department at the University of Illinois, where he is currently a professor of physics. His research interests include biological and synthetic DNA systems, nanopore sequencing, and molecular mechanisms of DNA replication.
