Structural DNA Nanotechnology

Few weeks ago, I posted an entry on DNA origami. I thought the idea was neat and creative but little did I know there are already a lot of other stuffs going on in the world.
The field - Structural DNA Nanotechnology (SDN). The person - Paul Rathemund. He has two beautiful smiley faces on his website. Quoted from his Nature paper, "an obvious application of patterned DNA origami would be the creation of a 'nanobreadboard', to which diverse components could be added. The attachment of proteins, for example, might allow novel biological experiments.."
Just few days ago, I come across this exciting news - a group of scientists at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute have developed the world's first gene detection platform made up entirely from self-assembled DNA nanostructures. This 'breakthrough' make possible a water soluble nanoarray which can help to build a more sensitive DNA probes.

Genomics

Green Alga Genome Project
This is one of the interesting Genome Project that most people might be interested in. One of the significant alga is the "Chlamydomonas reinhardtii". It is known to the research community as Chlamy. It is uniquely associated with carbon dioxide capture and generation of biomass. As fossil fuel have their limitation in supply, biomass is getting more and more popular as it also produce lesser greenhouse gas emission when using appropriate agricultural techniques and processing strategies. Many functions of it associate with a human helps in the basic understanding of certain human diseases.

Source: http://www.jgi.doe.gov/News/news_10_11_07.html

Sea Urchin Genome Project
A species Purple Sea Urchin(Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) is known to be closely related to human as both of the species is under the kingdom of deuterostome. For example, the membrane-bound receptor guanylate cyclase implicated in the important human disease, heat-stable enterotoxin dysentery, was first isolated from sea urchin sperm.

Source: http://www.hgsc.bcm.tmc.edu/projects/seaurchin/

common sense of our genomes?

another interesting article from Nature - common sense for our genomes.
The following are some quotes:

"A personal DNA sequence is not yet practically useful. But it could be, if we had the right resources available to interpret genomes"

"It remains to be seen whether we will learn anything more important from our genomes than the need to use sunscreen, eat better and exercise more"