Chemistry & Biochemistry Professor Presents Research at International Conference
Dr. Mark Heitz coauthored a poster with undergraduate students that presented their latest research on the effects of increased ionic liquid hydrophobicity on a model DNA oligomer at the 2022 Gordon Research Conference on Ionic Liquids.
The poster presented reported on combined set of experimental + simulation results that examined the intercalation of a 4, 10, and 16-carbon chain imidazolium ionic liquid with a self-complimentary 14 base pair synthetic DNA oligomer. The experimental work contributed from the Heitz lab was performed by Michelle Seifert, a visiting summer research student from the Technical University, Darmstadt, Germany, and native undergraduate students Derek McNeil and Josh Raymond.
Babak Minofar of the Institute of Microbiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences performed molecular dynamics simulations that explored the structural associations between the ionic liquid and DNA oligomer. In collaboration with Prof. Josh Blose, Brockport Biochemistry faculty, our research team is working to increase our understanding of structural motif effects in drug-DNA binding mechanisms to improve better drug delivery system designs.