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.