Collaborations

The Center for NanoTechnology collaborates with colleagues within and beyond the University of Wisconsin. Some of our current collaborators are:

James Thomson, UW Medical School

Michael Sussman, UW Department of Biochemistry

Lloyd Smith, UW Department of Chemistry

Peter Belshaw, UW Department of Chemistry

Pluripotent State of Stem Cells

We are developing the next generation of maskless array synthesizers for stem cell researcher James Thomson to expedite the investigation of how stem cells maintain their pluripotent state.

Our automated gene synthesizer promises huge advances in studying genes. Because it will be able to fit an entire transcriptome, including coding and non-coding RNA, the automated gene synthesizer will allow us to examine non-coding RNA, which has been implicated in maintaining the pluripotent state.

Embryonic stem cells may represent the earliest germ cell precursors, and, because the known machinery for germ cell specification is highly conserved among species, the essential genetic machinery that regulates the pluripotent state may also be highly conserved across even divergent vertebrates, such as humans, mice and zebrafish.
[More on James Thomson]

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