Nir Research Group
DNA Nanomachine Lab
Ben Gurion University of the Negev
July 2009
Roman: First single-molecules bursts observed in a newly build freely diffusing setup capable of measuring both FRET and ALEX ratios
March 2010
Roman: First-time trajectories acquired from immobilized molecules by TIRF setup
May 2010
Noa: DNA is doubly labeled with donor Cy3B and acceptor ATTO 647N through PCR with labeled primers.
July 2010
Miran: First DNA Origami is visualized with AFM
September 2010
Roman: First Fast dynamics of DNA hairpin was acquired with several millisecond time resolutions
October 2010
Rula: Complete first step measurement: starting with constructing the complete motor (state-A), continuing with introducing first fuel and releasing of left-leg from T1 and binding to T3 (state-B).
March 2011
Roman: More than 95% of DNA origami rectangle bound the surface in the desired orientation (face up)
Tommy: First-time successful measurement of walker striding on origami on the TIRF setup.
Noa: Reconstitution of nucleosome from 4 histones and doubly labeled DNA.
April 2011
Rula: Three motor states (A, B and C) detected and side reactions are identified.
A successful completion of Tommy: Full striding cycle of walker on origami.
September 2011
Congratulation to Tommy. His paper titled “Disentangling subpopulations in single molecule FRET and ALEX experiments with photon distribution analysis” was accepted to Biophysical Journal
June 2012
Rula's first paper titled " Studying the Structural Dynamics of Bipedal DNA Motors with Single-Molecule Fluorescence Spectroscopy" accepted in ACS Nano
Yaron joined the group as a master student
July 2012
Tommy's second paper titled " Rational Design of DNA Motors: Fuel Optimization through Single-Molecule Fluorescence" published in JACS
September 2013
Congratulations to Roman for his paper titled " Detailed Study of DNA Hairpin Dynamics using Single-Molecule Fluorescence Assisted by DNA Origami" published in J. Phys. Chem. B
​
Roman's second paper "Conformational Dynamics of DNA Hairpins at Millisecond Resolution Obtained from Analysis of Single-Molecule FRET Histograms" published in J. Phys. Chem. B
September 2014
Miran's gets his first paper titled " A Bipedal DNA Motor that Travels Back and Forth between Two DNA Origami Tiles" which is published in Small
April 2015
Dinesh joined Eyal Nir group as a post-doctoral fellow
​
Noa's gets her first paper titled " Nucleosome Core Particle Disassembly and Assembly Kinetics Studied Using Single-Molecule Fluorescence" which is published in Biophysical Journal
November 2016
Our paper titled " Photon-by-Photon Hidden Markov Model Analysis for Microsecond Single-Molecule FRET Kinetics" is published in J. Phys. Chem. B
April 2017
Our group published paper "DNA Bipedal Motor Achieves a Large Number of Steps Due to Operation Using MicrofluidicsBased Interface" in ACS Nano, which shows the highest yield a DNA based bipedal motor can practically achieve till date.
A story about this paper was published on Nanotechweb: "Microfluidics interface helps push two-legged nanobot"
​
Dinesh published his paper titled "DNA bipedal motor walking dynamics: an experimental and theoretical study of the dependency on step size" in Nucleic acids research
March 2018
Samrat joined the group as a graduate researcher.
​
Our paper titled "Study of DNA Origami Dimerization and Dimer Dissociation Dynamics and of the Factors that Limit Dimerization" was published in Small.
December 2018
​
Yaron successfully defended his Ph.D. Thesis on "Fast and Processive Computer Controlled DNA Bipedal Walker"
March 2019
​
Our paper titled "Self-Assembly of DNA Origami Heterodimers in High Yields and Analysis of the Involved Mechanisms" was published in Small.
April 2019
​
Haggai joined the group as a Master degree student and continued to PhD studies in the group
June 2019
​
Ofir joined our group as a project student, and later continued to Master degree in the group.
August 2019
​
Meitar joined our group as a project student and later continued to Master degree in the group.
December 2020
​
Haggai successfully defended his Master Thesis on "Investigating DNA Origami Rotors Connected to Gold Nanorods by Defocused Single-Molecule Imaging"
July 2022
​
Ofir successfully defended his Master Thesis on "Direct Observation of Computer Controlled DNA Bipedal Motor that Travels Long Distances"
December 2022
​
Samrat successfully defended his Ph.D. Thesis on "Computer-controlled DNA origami based Fast and Processive Motor"
January 2023
​
Meitar successfully defended her Master's Thesis on "DNA Origami based Molecular Threading"
February 2023
​
Samrat moved to join Prof. Jörg Enderlein's group at Georg-August-Universitat Göttingen as PostDoc
September-October 2011
Rula: Successful measurement of the kinetics of binding walker to track and of leg-lifting reaction upon fuel addition.
