Engineers see potential for new DNA research

DNA research may once have been the realm of biologists and chemists, but the increasing interconnectedness of science means that two engineers at the University of Texas at Arlington are focusing on the double helix and its potential.

Seong Jin Koh, associate professor in the materials science and engineering department, and Yaling Liu, assistant professor in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department, have both received funding from the National Science Foundation for projects they are pursuing.

Koh is developing a new way to sense DNA, even if only a small part of the long strand is available, and Liu is using computer simulation to study the DNA sequencing process. Both are still early in on their projects, but both hope there are future applications that will help other fields.

“It’s one of the newest trends of this whole field,” Liu said. “...You cannot stick to one specialty anymore.”

Liu’s background is in mechanical engineering, and he did focus on small-scale items and the world at a micro level. He was hired at UT-Arlington in 2007 for his nanobiotech expertise, and he started his current project in 2008. He admitted that each field — for example, each engineering specialty, each specialty in biology or chemistry and beyond — has its own language and breadth of knowledge, so some learning was in order to work on his current project.

Koh received word of his NSF funding in the fall of 2009, and his electromaterials background and nanotech experience are central to his work, which is developing a silicon chip sensor that will detect DNA. He said he didn’t actually need to know too much biology or in-depth information about DNA for his work.

However, as his work progresses and he focuses on applications — like engineering the sensor to detect the mutated DNA of a cancer cell, or the DNA of harmful food contaminant bacteria — he expects to collaborate more with other scientific specialties.

“There are a lot of applications and a lot of the health benefits,” Koh said.

Liu’s work is to model the individual atoms that make up DNA and see how they interact with each other before moving on to model how they interact with other things. DNA is very small and its binds and sequences very quickly, and researchers are still trying to understand how it works before moving on to more complicated tasks, like applying those principles to things like drug delivery.

“It’s very hard to observe it, even with a microscope,” Liu said.

Liu has worked with other faculty at UT-Arlington, and he said it’s not unusual for funding requests to list more than one principal investigator. Pooling more expertise into one project means tougher projects can be undertaken, he said, and there is increased funding for collaborative work.

However, any research project requires an investigator to be open to learning during the process. Addition in collaborators from other fields means an investigator has to be open to learning even more, and communication can be difficult. As time goes on, though, things get better, Liu said.

“You have to learn a lot of new things yourself in order to carry out the project. That’s why collaboration is so important,” he said.

ebassett@bizpress.net