Danish Team wins First BIOMOD International Undergraduate Nanobiology Design Competition

T he first annual International Bio-Molecular Design Competition (BIOMOD2011) was held on November 5, 2011, at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, USA). BioMod is a design competition for undergraduate students that was founded by Wyss Institute Technology Development Fellow Shawn Douglas. Teams of students engineer novel nanoscale structures or machines that self-assemble from biological macromolecules and have useful biological and therapeutic applications. Twenty-one undergraduate teams including more than 100 students from America, Europe, and Asia participated. The teams designed, built, and analyzed their systems during the summer and then prepared a short talk, a YouTube video, and a Wiki page documenting the project. The Grand Prize winner and winner of the Best Presentation prize was the Danish Nano Artists team (Fig. 1). Their nanostructure, titled ‘Octahedral RNA origami for simultaneous drug delivery and gene knockdown’, was a three-dimensional ribonucleic acid (RNA) structure that regulates protein expression in the cell (Fig. 2). It self-assembles from a long RNA strand that is folded into an octahedron by eight shorter RNA strands. The octahedron is cut into several smaller RNAs by the cell’s RNA interference machinery. The smaller RNA fragments cause a decrease in the expression of specific target genes. The team included five bachelor’s degree students from the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Centre (iNANO), Aarhus University: Mie Elholm Birkbak, Irene Maria Hansen, Jens Vogensen Biasevich, Hans Christian Høiberg, and Steffen Lynge Sparvath.