BioZone is supporting the wet lab component of the UofT Biomod team’s project.
The UofT Biomod team is comprised of undergraduate students preparing a bio-nanotechnology project to compete at BIOMOD, an annual bio-molecular design competition hosted by the Wyss Institute for biologically inspired engineering at Harvard University. The purpose of this competition is to challenge undergraduate students from around the world to use their creativity to engineer biomolecules on the nanometer scale and present their findings at the annual Biomod Jamboree. Past projects have focused on bimolecular robotics, logic and computing, and structural bionanotechnology. The UofT Biomod Team has worked on a bionanotechnology design for a multi-drug carrier built with DNA origami and will be testing its functions using gold nanoparticles as a payload.
This experience provides students with the opportunity to improve their skills in research, engineering and experimentation. For the past year, the team researched scientific literature to design the structure and functions of the multi-drug carrier system. The design is currently being developed and characterized through wet lab experiments and imaging analysis conducted in the Biozone lab and Christopher Yip’s lab from the IBBME department. Team members have worked countless hours in troubleshooting various aspects of the design and continue to do so as the structure is being developed in the lab. There are weekly meetings to discuss progress and tackle any problems that arise as well as journal club-style discussions on relevant literature. In addition to this enriching research experience, the team also participates in other aspects of project management. As an independent student team, we have worked to advertise and recruit interested students, and applied to various sources to secure our funding for this project. Furthermore, the project requires a wikipage, a Youtube video and a final oral presentation that are also being developed as the project progresses.
