On Apr. 8, 2015, Prof. Juewen Liu from the Department of Chemistry of the University of Waterloo Visited SINANO and delivered a talk entitled “Interfacing DNA with Metal Ions, Metal Oxides, and Metal Nanoparticles”. The presentation was chaired by Prof. Renjun Pei. Many researchers and graduate students participated in this report.  

At the meeting, Prof. Juewen Liu based on four related examples about his research. 1) In vitro selection of RNA-cleaving DNAzymes in the presence of lanthanide ions has been carried out, yielding highly selective new enzymes that works only with trivalent lanthanides. 2) DNA can be adsorbed by a number of metal oxide nanoparticles via the phosphate backbone. This conjugate was used for detecting hydrogen peroxide and arsenate ions. Related reaction mechanisms have also been explored. 3) and 4) Finally, he presented his work on the adsorption of DNA by gold nanoparticles and DNA-templated fluorescent gold nanoclusters. Thorough discussion on the impressive results was carried out after presentation. 

Prof. Juewen Liu brief introduction: Prof. Liu received his B.Sc. in Chemistry from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2000, and his Ph.D. in Chemistry with Professor Yi Lu at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2005. He joined the Department of Chemistry of the University of Waterloo in 2009, and he is currently an Associate Professor. He is also affiliated with the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology (WIN). He received the Early Researcher Award (2011) from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (MRI) and the Fred Beamish Award (2014) from the Analytical Division of the Canadian Society for Chemistry (CSC). He has published >120 peer-reviewed papers, receiving over 6000 citations.