The Department of Chemical Engineering is pleased to welcome Professor Lin-Yue Lanry Yung, an Associate Professor at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS), to our seminar series. He will discuss robust self-contained DNA circuit design for biosensing.
All graduate Chemical Engineering students will receive an Outlook calendar event with webinar access details.
Everyone is welcome – If you are not a graduate Chemical Engineering student, contact the Manager of Graduate Studies for the access information you need to join the webinar.
Abstract
DNA is the basic building block of life with well-characterized thermodynamics of hybridization. The predictability of Watson-Crick base pairing rules has inspired the use of DNA as a material to design different molecular structures and devices.
The field of dynamic DNA nanotechnology, or DNA circuit, focuses on designing kinetic pathways for autonomous computation. Despite its promises as a highly programmable toolbox, DNA circuit has yet to mature into a widely-adopted method in applications such as bio-detection and imaging.
A key bottleneck is the recurring issue of circuit leakage, along with the lack of explicit design guidelines for the practical implementation of each design concept. In this talk, we will address this issue by designing a self-contained localized DNA circuit to promote the rate of desired reaction over undesired leakage reactions.
The self-contained circuit can further be broken down into three functional modules: target recognition, signal transduction and signal amplification, and each module have been investigated with a focus on establishing design guidelines to minimize their respective leakages.
Finally, the optimized modules have been integrated in the final design, named Split Proximity Circuit (SPC). Examples of SPC application in biosensing including single nucleotide mutations, breast cancer biomarkers and SARS-CoV-2 will be discussed.
Biographical Sketch
Lin-Yue Lanry Yung is an Associate Professor at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
His current research interest focuses on molecular design of DNA circuits for biosensing applications. He has established a bioassay with the autonomous DNA circuit capable of detecting cancer and infectious diseases including SARS-CoV-2 in a single step manner without washing, and is pursing commercialization of this assay.
He was the Vice Dean (Undergraduate Education) at the Faculty of Engineering at NUS from 2014 to 2019, where he emphasized on technopreneurship education and helped to introduce an Innovation and Design Program (iDP) where students with different engineering disciplines are grouped together and work on multi-year industrial-led projects.
Professor Lin-Yue Lanry Yung, from National University of Sinapore's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering