All-atom and multiscale modeling of silicon nanobiodevices

COMP 179

Aleksei Aksimentiev, aksiment@uiuc.edu, Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801
With ever-advancing miniaturization of silicon technology, semiconductor electric circuits can now be manufactured having features comparable in size to the building blocks of life: DNA and proteins. Embedding functional biomacromolecules in such heterogeneous synthetic nanostructures opens up tantalizing possibilities for integrating robust man-made electric circuitry with the intricate machinery of a living cell. The complexity of the biomolecular structure and the nonlinearity of the equations describing charge equilibrium in such bionanoelectric systems require computer modeling to complement conceptual insights of nanoscale physics and molecular biology. In this talk I will describe our progress toward developing a computational methodology for modeling synthetic bionanodevices. The talk will highlight recent applications of the methodology to modeling nanopore devices for high-throughput sequencing DNA, enabled by the use of supercomputer resources at the NSF-supported supercomputer centers.