Working on this collaborative project in the Krieg lab has been a real pleasure. It began as a side ninja project with almost no budget but has grown and expanded so much. Really proud of what we have accomplished🥺 please check it out: advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Big thanks also to the polymer theory team of Michael Lang (co-corresponding author) and Jens-Uwe Sommer @tudresden.bsky.social who convinced us to work on this, and who conducted essential simulations that helped design and understand this material.
10/11
This was a tour-de-force. Big congratulation to the whole team, in particular our FOUR outstanding first authors:
Sarah Speed 🙏
Yu-Hsuan Peng @jasperpeng.bsky.social 🙏
Azra Atabay @azratabye.bsky.social 🙏
Krishna Gupta @anekoplato.bsky.social 🙏
9/11
The team characterized the Olympic #hydrogel with AFM, cryo-SEM, confocal microscopy, lots of rheology, and large-scale computer simulations.
8/11
The DLKs are designed to be activated by a nicking endonuclease to form 20-nucleotide sticky ends.
This allows us to reversibly open the rings by heating and cooling. When they circularize at high concentration, the plasmids become mechanically interlocked.
7/11
We used large libraries containing more than 4 billion DNA sequences. These "diversified lock & key" (DLK) sequences were inserted into a plasmid and amplified in E. Coli. In the end, we get more than 16,000 different plasmids, confirmed by Next-Gen Sequencing.
6/11
Our trick: Make lots of different linear molecules that can circularize but cannot react with each other. 💡
But classical organic chemistry doesn’t offer enough orthogonal reactive groups to do this. 🤨
Instead, we exploit the selective recognition capabilities of #DNA. 🧬
5/11
The problem:
when you try to circularize linear molecules at high concentration in an attempt to mechanically interlock them, they instead form linear oligomers or larger circles.
4/11
This material was first proposed by Pierre-Gilles de Gennes half a century ago, but it is extremely difficult to make.
3/11
An Olympic gel (OG) is a weird type of soft material. Unlike classical materials, OGs do not contain network junctions but they are built by mechanical interlocking of circular molecules.
2/11
🔴Finally out TODAY in Advanced Materials:
“Assembling a True Olympic Gel From over 16 000 Combinatorial #DNA Rings”
#MaterialsScience
#Nanotechnology
Explainer thread below 👇👇👇
Big congrats to Sarah, Peng, and Krishna for this nice paper!
Link to the article: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
If you're working with pulldown assays but suffer from their low capacity, low flexibility, sub-optimal specificity, carryover contaminations, and high cost, you may want to check out LASSO.
Feel free to DM me if you're interested in testing it!
LASSO can also be programmed to isolate non-nucleic acid targets. Here we used it to pull down and release human thrombin.
The released protein retained 98% of its catalytic activity, highlighting how gentle this process is.
LASSO rRNA depletion boosts detection of transcripts in #RNAseq by 430%.
This improvement is on par with Gold-Standard commercial kits, but introduces significantly lower biases and preserves diagnostically valuable microRNA populations.
Here's the phase separation in action. A fluorescently labeled mock target is isolated by the nascent polymer-based "fishing nets" within minutes.
Importantly, these fishing nets consist of 99.7% water, which allows exceptionally low off-target binding.
Just out in
@angewandtechemie.bsky.social!
#LASSO a new method for ultra-selective isolation of biomolecules (DNA, RNA, or protein).
This method uses a unique polymer phase separation mechanism to gently capture and pull down specific target sequences.
More great news for the holidays🎄
Our new review on "Functionalizing Nucleic Acids: Synthesis and Purification Strategies for Bioconjugates as Biomaterials" is out: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Many thanks to Nico Alleva, Jian Zhang and Torsten John!
Thank you! :)
Thanks to Advanced Functional Materials for highlighting our work on their back cover!
LASSO can be used for DNA, RNA or protein pulldown.
Excitingly, it outperforms gold standard rRNA depletion methods for #RNAseq library construction.
Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Big congrats to Dr. Krishna Gupta for winning the best poster prize at Oxford Global’s NextGen Omics conference in London, where he presented our work on #LASSO pulldown polymers. 💪
LASSO is a new general-purpose method for fast and ultra-selective biomolecule purification.
Fresh in @natchemeng.nature.com Growing artificial cytoskeleton in the viscoelastic confinement of DNA Artificial Cells. Brilliant work bey Weixiang! #Syntheticcell #systemschemistry
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Congratulations to Soumya and Charu for making the first ATP-fueled homeostatic cytokine delivery system for communication between artificial and living cells. Now in Angewandte Chemie @angewandtechemie.bsky.social #syntheticcell #noneqsys #DNAnanoscience
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Multiplexed detection of viral pathogens on an AUTONOMOUSLY LOADING chip for point-of-care #diagnostics.
Congrats to first authors Beatrise Berzina and Krishna Gupta and the entire EKFZ-funded *VirChip* team!
Schering Young Investigator Award 2025 by the Schering Stiftung for Agnes Toth-Petroczy @tothpetroczylab.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de @csbdresden.bsky.social. She receives the award for her work on the evolution, diversity, and function of proteins. Congratulations! 🎉 www.mpi-cbg.de/news-outreac...
This type of technology is used on cryptocurrency hardware wallets. Even though no technology is 100% safe, that's as good as it gets.
I think technology can at least mitigate the other side of the problem, which is that our incentive structure is broken. Ideally we'd fix the latter was well.
