National Center for Design of
Biomimetic Nanoconductors

• Organization:
• Overview
• Research Network
• Nanomedicine
• Science Advisory Board

Research Network

The figure below, which is made with the systems biology software Cytoscape, is a visualization of the interactions that were described in the above text on scientific interactions. It is seen that for every pair of investigators, there are multiple paths connection them. This is generally thought to be a sign of a robust network (Albert and Barabasi, 2002), since it ensures that losing a single node, or breaking a single connection, will not break the network. Networks of interacting genes tend to be of this sort (Ravasz et al, 2002).

By contrast, a network consisting of a tree with isolated branches would be more fragile. For example, today’s World Wide Web is robust, whereas the early internet of the 1980’s had a fragile tree-like structure that permitted on one occasion the internet of the entire eastern part of the country to be brought down by a computer malfunction that sent a large continuous data stream from one computer in Houston to one other computer in Boston.

Based on analogy with the “mutual friend” principle governing growth of social networks (Jin et al, 2001), we believe that a networked structure such as this will also maximize the likely growth of collaborations with other groups outside our Center. This structure has been designed by us to be both robust internally and open externally, the former to maximize productivity and the latter to maximize our ability to collaborate with other Centers in the Nanomedicine Roadmap network and with other scientists.

Collaborations represented by some of the numbers:

2. Coordination and oversight, RAPPTURE
6. Dynamical descriptions of proton motion
7,8. Optimization of molecular dynamics
11. Simulation and modeling of lipid environment in nanopores
12. Incorporating proton hopping features into molecular dynamics
17. Incorporating polarizable force fields into molecular dynamics
22. Analysis of approaches for computing fluxes in channels
24. Brownian dynamics
27. Electrostatic calculations for Biomoca and drift-diffusion theory
30, 31. Integration of ChemCell with Prophet
32, 35. Integration of drift-diffusion with model of water and solute transport across membrane
36. Design of biobattery appropriate to power artificial retina
41-44. Ensure relevance and validity of membrane modeling
45-46. Scaffolded transport membranes
47. Ion-channels and beta barrel scaffolds for transport across membrane
48. Channel measurements
49. Software engineering/integration

The National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors is funded by Grant Number PHS 2 PN2 EY016570B from the National Institutes of Health through the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research and is based at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Partner institutions include Yale University, University of Southern California, University of Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, Sandia National Laboratories, Argonne National Laboratory, Oxford University, Wabash College, University of California, Davis, nanoHUB at Purdue University, and the University of New Mexico.