Science Off CameraPodcast

Episode 27: Dr. Rebecca Pinals

Rebecca Pinals (@RLPlikesscience) is a scientist and PhD candidate with the Landry Lab (@Landry_Lab) at the University of California, Berkeley. In this episode, tune in to hear about how the optical properties of carbon nanotube nanosensors make them a great tool for sensing of biochemicals, and how Rebecca and her group recently applied nanotubes to detect coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

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I am very excited to be involved in this kind of research, especially now, where it feels like we can help at least a little bit in the current pandemic situation, in applying these nanotechnologies to probe and understand biological systems

Research

The Landry Lab is a team of highly interdisciplinary scientists working at the intersection of nanomaterials research, near-infrared microscopy, and their application to the study of life.

“Life takes on unique characteristics at the nano-scale. We are accustomed to making observations and predictions for the behavior of living systems on a scale that is intuitive for the time and size scales of our day-to-day lives. For centuries, scientific advancements have been on a size-scale that is familiar to us: distances in meters, times in seconds, masses in kilograms, and volumes in liters. However, the building blocks of life: proteins, nucleic acids, cells, all live at a very different scale. When we zoom into life down to the molecular level, the scales used to describe distances, times, masses, and volumes shrink to a level that is not intuitive to one accustomed to living life at the macro-scale. Our lab focuses on understanding and exploiting nanomaterials to access information about biological systems stored at the nano-scale.”

Links

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