Instrumentation and Measurement Development for Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) Spectroscopy of Bionanomaterials

Recent advances in nanofabrication and biotechnology rely on bionanomaterials, which are often used to marry bottom-to-top self-assembly with top-down lithographic methods. In biotechnology, bionanomaterials can be therapies (monoclonal antibodies) or components of nanoscale drug delivery vectors.  Structural measurements on bionanomaterials enable design and engineering of robust, reliable systems. Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy is a structural biology method that is particularly powerful for nanoscale systems lacking long-range (crystalline) order, a regime in which many bionanomaterials fall.  In this talk, I present contributions to advance EPR spectroscopy for bionanomaterials, highlighting our work to measure distances between cationic copper porphyrins bound to an unusual DNA structural element as well as efforts in instrumentation development to improve measurement of volume-limited samples.