Izar Schaerf, visiting MSc student from Heidelberg University, lead a project aiming to develop a new method for the purification of peptide- and protein-functionalised nanostructures. Being able to easily and consistently purify nanostructures decorated with biologics is crucial to our work so we are very excited to see this paper out! Special thanks to the group of Viktorija Glembockyte at Heidelberg, who validated our method with their complex nanostructures. Read it here:

Anna and Ioanna write a highlight on our work on fusogenic liposomes and their interactions with Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, published in Volume 42 of Advances in Biomembranes and Lipid Self-Assembly . Read it here: https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.abl.2025.07.006

Today we are welcoming three new lab members, Yomna Gabr, who will be studying for a PhD on macro DNA origami arrays, Yuening Su, who will be studying for a PhD on the selective targeting of activated platelets and John Wang, who will be studying for an MPhil on the targeted delivery of novel antimicrobial compounds. Lovely to have you in the lab, all!

On the 5th July, Ioanna gave a talk at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition on "Can origami made of DNA help us kill superbugs". It was a fun day with audience members of all ages - thank you to the lab members, current and old that attended!

It’s (not) away day time again! On the 26th June, we spent a day at  Emmanuel College, Cambridge , discussing the lab’s progress on  DNA nanotechnology  for  drug delivery  and on  aptamer   selection for bacterial and mammalian targets. Very excited to see projects coming together and everyone’s hard work coming to fruition! This year, we were again very lucky to have with us visitors to the lab: Manon Libotte, PhD student at the University of Bologna, Italy; Bianca Greul,

Anna and Ioanna write a protocol on targeting bacteria with DNA nanostructures for the third edition of DNA Nanotechnology - Methods and Protocols, published by Springer Nature and edited by Professor Giampaolo Zuccheri, University of Bologna. Read it here: https://link.springer.com/protocol/10.1007/978-1-0716-4394-5_8

We attended the Physics of Life 2025 Conference in Harrogate, on March 24-27. A huge well done to Yuening, Celeste, Zoya, Federico and Maria on their poster presentations! Looking forward to Physics of Life 2027!

Ioanna delivers the 2024 Judith Howard Prize lecture at the Biophysical Sciences Institute, Durham University. It was a big honour and brilliant to interact with everyone on the day. A big thank you to the organisers!

We attended the 2024 British Society for Nanomedicine at Emmanuel College, Cambridge! Well done to Anna and Maria for their talks and to Federico and Tim for their Poster presentations. Special congratulations to Anna for her Best Talk Prize and to Tim for his poster that was Highly Commended!

We are very pleased to see this collaborative work with the Laser Analytics Group published! We characterise the interactions of cationic fusogenic liposomes with Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacterial targets. Congratulations to Anna for leading this project and revealing these exciting interaction mechanisms! Read it here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jacs.3c11463

We are delighted that a second Royal Society International Exchanges grant has been awarded to the lab. This time, we will work with Professor Alessandro Podesta, form the Department of Physics, University of Milan, Italy, to investigate the use of advanced microscopy techniques, (AFM and super-resolution) to investigate cancer-associated microbiome markers in breast cancer.

We have been awarded a Research Grant from the Royal Society, to work in collaboration with Professor Graham Ladds in the Department of Pharmacology, University of Cambridge over a year, to select aptamers for GPCR targets. Very excited to work on this and establish Tim's research direction in the lab!

We are very excited to have been awarded an International Exchanges grant from the Royal Society, to explore the use of aptamers as tools for the mapping of the surface of S. aureus bacteria in collaboration with Dr Pedro Pereira at ITQB NOVA in Portugal. This grant will establish the collaboration between the two labs and allow us to collect preliminary data.

We collaborate with the groups of Professor Roisin Owens and Professor Clemens Kaminski, to characterise supported lipid bilayers derived from bacterial outer membrane vesicles. We use correlative AFM to reveal their features at the nanoscale and explore their potential as tunable models of the bacterial outer membrane. Read it here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.langmuir.2c00628

I am delighted to have been awarded a proof of concept grant from the National Biofilms Innovation Centre, in collaboration with...

My paper on DNA Nanostructures for Targeted Antimicrobial Delivery is now online at Angewandte Chemie. Very excited to see this work out!...

My work on DNA nanostructures that target bacteria has been covered by the popular science magazine, New Scientist....

I was delighted to be invited by Professor Hiroshi Sugiyama to give a seminar on "Applications of correlative Atomic Force with...

I visited the laboratory of Professor Hiroshi Sugiyama at Kyoto University. During my 3 weeks there I worked with the DNA origami team,...