RNA Nanotechnology

Bin Wang obtained her Ph.D. from the Department of Chemistry at Queen’s University (Canada). Her doctoral studies with Richard D. Oleschuk and J. Hugh Horton spanned the areas of analytical chemistry, nanotechnology, and surface chemistry, which involved developing polymer materials to fabricate microfluidic devices and further chemical modification of polymer surfaces for specific microfluidic applications. After finishing her Ph.D. study, Dr. Wang conducted a one-year postdoctoral research with P. Martin Petkovich at Queen’s University to develop antigen- and antibody-modified polymer microdevices. In 2005, she joined Kevin M. Weeks’ research group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her postdoctoral work involved applying the newly developed RNA structure–analyzing technology to monitor ligand-induced conformational changes in tRNAs and mRNAs. Dr. Wang’s areas of interest are RNA biochemistry and nanotechnology.

• Fundamental Aspects of RNA; Computational Approaches for Predicting RNA Structures; Traditional and Emerging Experimental Approaches for Probing RNA Structures, Including X-Ray Crystallography, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy, Enzymatic Cleavage, Chemical Probing, Nucleotide Analog Interference Mapping (NAIM), In-Line Probing, Thermal Denaturation, and Single-Molecule Approaches; The Design and Construction of RNA-Based Nanostructures; The Potential Biological and Therapeutic Applications of Small RNA Molecules Such as Small/Short Interfering RNAs (siRNAs), MicroRNAs (miRNAs), RNA Aptamers, and Ribozymes; Alternative Splicing; RNA Motifs for Sensing Metal Ions.