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Focusing Laser Light on Tiny Nanopores will Boost Accuracy of DNA Sequencing Method

Now Meller and a team of researchers at the Technion and Boston University have discovered a simple way to improve the sensitivity, accuracy and speed of the method, making it an even more viable option for DNA sequencing or characterization of small proteins, such as Ubiquitin in their native, folded, state.

In the November 3 online edition of Nature Nanotechnology, the team demonstrated that focusing a low-power, commercially available green laser on a nanopore increases current near walls of the pore, which is immersed in salt water. As the current increases, it sweeps the salt water along with it in the opposite direction of incoming samples. The onrushing water, in turn, acts as a brake, slowing down the passage of DNA through the pore. As a result, the nanoscale sensors can get a higher-resolution read of the DNA as it crosses the pore, and identify small, proteins that could not previously be detected.

Meller: “The light-induced surface charge modulation phenomenon that we describe in this paper can be used to instantly switch on and off the “brakes” acting on individual biopolymers, such as DNA or proteins sliding through the nanopores. This critically enhances the sensing resolution of solid-state nanopores, and can be easily integrated in future nanopore based DNA sequencing and protein detection technologies”

Slowing down DNA is essential to DNA or RNA sequencing with nanopores, so that nanoscale sensors can make the right call on what’s passing through.

“The goal is to hold a base pair (of DNA nucleotides) in the nanopore’s sensing volume long enough to ‘call the base’ (i.e, determine if it’s an A, C, G or T),” said co-author Allison Squires (a Boston University student, who also worked at the Technion and fabricated nanopores in the study). “The signal needs to be sufficiently different for each base for sensors in the nanopore to make the call. If the sample proceeds through the sensing volume too quickly, it’s hard for the sensors to interpret the signal and make the right call.”

Meller and his team characterized the amount of increase in current under varying illumination in many different-sized nanopores. They next aim to explore in greater detail the mechanism underlying the increase in surface current when the green laser is applied to a nanopore, information that could lead to even more sensitivity and accuracy in DNA sequencing.

Illustration: The Opto-electrical effect can be used to control the passage of DNA molecules through nanopore sensors, thereby leading to more accurate sensing and sequencing of individual DNA molecules

Over twenty students from Yale University were hosted at Technion last week as part of the Global Network Week (GNW) program. GNW is an international program held for the first time at Technion. The event organizers, Professor Miriam Erez and Dr. Harry Yuklea from the Technion MBA program, said that as a result of the project’s overwhelming success, another event will be held in March.

GNW is a unique student exchange program that enables MBA students study at different MBA schools. This framework allows students from different schools to network at a week-long event that focuses on specific business topics and exposes them to other academic curricula. Technion is the first and only Israeli institute that is a member of this global network.

The GNW week at Technion was dedicated to the topic of “Startup Nation”. Apart from the Yale students, additional ten students from the Technion (studying at the Haifa Campus and Tel Aviv Branch), and six students from Spain, Mexico and China participated in the event. During this week, students were exposed to Israeli entrepreneurship and to the relationship between academic, industry and innovation. They heard seminars termed “Israel’s Innovative Culture,” “Capital and Innovation – the Israeli Model,” and “Serial High-Tech Entrepreneurs in Israel.” Vivian, a Chinese student from Yale, said that “Up until now, I only linked Israel with tension and conflicts, but this week I discovered a magical land, a country that is modern and multicultural, filled with warm, intelligent and inquisitive people.”

Oren Dvoskin, a student of Technion’s MBA program, said that, “This was an exciting and intensive week, in which we were given a wide prospective with respect to academics, entrepreneurship, strategy and financial aspects, and about inventors who went on to become entrepreneurs. I gained a better understanding of the importance for entrepreneurs to be capable of seeing the big picture, as well as continually validating their target audience who would be interested in the technology they are developing.”

“The principal logic of the program,” explains Dr. Yuklea, “is to impart to students that there is no such thing as a “secret recipe” for entrepreneurship, but that we can give them the ‘spices’ with which they can prepare their unique dish. All of this week’s participants were brilliant students, and I believe that the process they underwent showed them the complexity of entrepreneurial work as well as the important attributes that an entrepreneur requires beyond the knowledge that can be learned at a university.”

As part of Technion’s membership in the GNW network, six MBA students from the Technion travelled abroad: four students went to Yale University in the US, and two students travelled to Fudan University in China.

Above: Professor Miriam Erez with a Yale University student. Photographed by: Shiatzo Photography Services, Technion’s Spokesperson’s Office

Prof. Moshe Sidi has been appointed as the new Senior Executive Vice President of the Technion, replacing Prof. Paul Feigin, who has completed his six-year term.

Prof. Sidi has been a faculty member at Technion’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering since 1982. He received all his degrees from the Technion and, during 1983-84, he completed his postdoctoral studies at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). For his research work during these years, he received the Fulbright Award and the Rothschild Fellowship. Over the years, he was a visiting scientist at IBM, served as an editor for a number of IEEE publications and co-authored a book entitled “Multiple Access Protocols: Performance and Analysis” published at 1990 by Springer Verlag.

Prof. Sidi’s research interests are in wireless networks and multiple access protocols; traffic characterization and guaranteed grade of service in high-speed networks; queuing modeling and performance evaluation of computer communication networks. He has published more than 165 papers in these areas in leading journals and conferences.

Prof. Sidi has previously served in senior administrative positions, among them as Dean of Electrical Engineering (2003-2004) and most recently as the Technion Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs (2006 – 2012).

Photo: Prof. Moshe Sidi

This is the first time this award has been awarded to an Israeli researcher

The highly esteemed Arthur L. Schawlow award was founded in 1991 in order to recognize outstanding basic research contributions where lasers are used to promote the understanding of the fundamental physical properties of materials and their interaction with light.

Among the list of 25 past winners of this award, there are six people who, after winning the Schawlow Prize, went onto win the Nobel Prize in Physics, among them: John Hall, Steve Chu, Theodor Hansch, William Phillips, Carl Wieman, and David Wineland.

The 2014 award will be awarded to Professor Segev for his “groundbreaking contributions to the study of light-matter interactions, in particular the discovery of optical spatial solitons in photorefractive media, for milestone contributions on nonlinear waves in photonic lattices, and for observation of Anderson localization of light.”

Professor Segev is one of the ten Distinguished Professors of the Technion. He has received many academic awards over the years, including the prestigious Quantum Electronics Prize in 2007 (the most important award given by the European Physics Society for all areas of optics and lasers), and the Max Born Award conferred by the Optical Society of America in 2009. In 2011, he was elected into the National Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Following the announcement, Professor Segev said the following, “Discovering new phenomena, unexpected or counterintuitive, are the things that motivate me. Of course I was glad to hear that I have won this award, but in general, I carry out my work without thinking about awards. When they told me about this award, I was excited for about an hour, and then went back to thinking about how respond to the editor of one of the scientific journals currently handling our research article. Indeed, it’s nice to win awards but there are more important values in life. For example – how to bring back to Israel a young talented researcher who preferred to take a professorship position at Harvard University instead of accepting an offer from the Technion. This ‘brain drain’ from Israel is a national problem. We must handle it wisely in a way which should, among other things, include education for values. It’s called Zionism without quotation marks.

Professor Segev is the Scientific Director of the I-CORE in Light and Matter Center of Excellence.

Above: Professor Mordechai (Moti) Segev. Photographed by: Technion Spokesperson’s Office

The academic year opened on October 13; the most popular faculties this year are Medicine, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Architecture and Mechanical Engineering; this year the academic reforms within the Technion’s study framework will continue, as too, the efforts to improve the quality of teaching

Throughout the 2013-14 academic year, the university will continue to implement the recommendations of the Committee charged with the task of examining the academic framework and the study load, headed by Professor Yachin Cohen from the Faculty of Chemical Engineering. Nine professors made up the Committee including the Chairman of the Student Association (known as ASAT in Hebrew), Danny Magner. According to the Committee’s recommendations, starting from the beginning of the current academic year, special resources will be allocated to improve teaching quality in the core courses, and reward outstanding teachers. Additionally, the “Good Start” program will be expanded on; the program aims to prepare students for Technion’s high academic demands, and to help them cope with their first year of study here. Within the framework of the program, students are offered online preparatory courses, to prepare them for the academic requirements in the core first year courses. In the following academic year (2015-16) the university will apply to the academic calendar a separation between the period of study and the exam period – the semesters will be shortened by 1 week (to 13 weeks) and in each semester one full vacation week will be given that will enable students to study for their exams with a peaceful mind. In addition, the university is also looking into alternative admission requirements, which will be based on the results of mathematics and physics exams instead of the Psychometric Entrance Test that is in practice today.

Technion President, Professor Peretz Lavie, said that a week before the start of the new academic year, “Technion took a significant step in fulfilling its vision – to be counted among the elite group of the world’s leading sci-tech universities – when it signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a Technological Institute in Guangdong Province, beside the University of Shantou in southeastern China. This initiative is very similar to the establishment two years ago, of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute (JTCII) in New York, and to other joint international cooperation that the university is involved with.  The US $130 million donation made by the Li Ka Shing Foundation, is the largest gift ever given to Technion, and it will be dedicated to promoting the wellbeing of Technion students and faculty on the university’s Haifa campus. Already in the upcoming academic year, student wellbeing will be at the center of the university’s action plans. I have set myself a goal to improve the overall atmosphere on campus, and together with Technion’s Senior Administration and the Student Association, will continue to work towards improving the quality of teaching and conduct towards students according to the recommendations of the Committee charged with the task of examining the academic framework and the study load at Technion.”

The total student body at Technion for the 2014-15 academic year is 13,000, of which 9,000 undergraduate students will study in 18 faculties.

Technion Alumnus, Professor Arieh Warshel, is one of three scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2013. Warshel shares his award with his research partners Professor Michael Levitt from the University of Stanford with whom he completed his doctorate at the Weizmann Institute, and Professor Martin Karplus (affiliated with the University of Strasbourg and Harvard University). They will be awarded this prize for “developing computer models of complex chemical processes.”

Warshel, an Israeli-American, was born on November 20, 1940 in Kibbutz Sde Nahum, Israel. He served in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) between 1958-1962, and married Tamar Warshel in 1966. The couple has two daughters, Merav and Yael. Warshel did his undergraduate degree at the Technion, graduating with excellence in 1966. One year before completing his degree, Technion awarded him “The Best Third Year Student in Chemistry.” He did his master’s and doctoral studies at the Weizmann Institute, and in 1969 completed his doctorate. Today he serves as a research professor at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Warshel has been awarded many prestigious awards, including USC Associates Award for Creativity in Research, and the Annual Award of the International Society for Quantum Biology and Pharmacology (1993). Since 2008 he has been a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (since 2009).

Following the announcement of the award, Technion President, Professor Peretz Lavie said, “I met Arieh two years ago in Los Angeles. He is a modest man, a Hebrew speaker, who maintains his Israeli identity. He has good memories from his studies at Technion. I congratulate him on being awarded the most prestigious award in science. The fact that another Israeli has been awarded the Nobel Prize indicates the great potential inherent in our country, and I hope that we’ll know how to use it advantageously.”

Professor Alon Hoffman, the Dean of Technion’s Schulich Faculty of Chemistry, congratulated all three Nobel Prize winners and said that his is, “Proud to stand at the head of a leading school of chemistry, which has produced yet another Nobel Prize winner.” (Professor Warshel is the fourth Nobel Prize winner with a chemistry education from the Technion in the past decade).

“Warshel studied his four-year undergraduate degree at Technion,” added Professor Hoffman, “And conducted his research project with Professor Ruben Pauncz, the first in Israel to study quantum chemistry. He went on to do his graduate studies at the Weizmann Institute and pursued an independent career in the United States. Professor Warshel and his research partners are pioneers in the field of theoretical and computational chemistry. Thanks to them, computer programs have virtually become a standard simulation tool for chemical processes in research laboratories. The Faculty of Chemistry at Technion is a leader in this advanced research.”

The work by Warshel, Karplus and Levitt is truly groundbreaking as they were able to reconcile between Newton’s classical physics and quantum physics, which differs significantly. Prior to their breakthrough, chemists had to choose between the two. The strength of classical physics is the simple calculations that can be done within its framework, which can be used for modeling large molecules. Its weaknesses lie in the fact that it does not provide a way of modeling chemical reactions. Subsequently, chemists were forced to use quantum physics, calculations that require enormous computing power and therefore were used for only modeling small molecules. This year’s Nobel Prize winners took the best of both worlds, creating methods that use both classical and quantum physics as one.

Above: Professor Arieh Warshel. Photograph from wikicommons

1. The anode configuration is changed significantly. With the regular Hall thruster, the anode work area is perpendicular to the engine axis. In the CAMILA, it is parallel.
2. Fuel supply (xenon gas) is not carried directly through the anode but through a special gas distributor which is isolated from contact with the anode.
3. In Hall thrusters existing today, the magnetic field is closer to the radial form (perpendicular to the engine axis) but in CAMILA the magnetic field has a special, much more complex configuration. In the area of ion acceleration (engine exit) the magnetic field is radial and on the other side, which is within the anode (ionization area) – the magnetic field is parallel to the engine axis.