Levkin Research Group of Biofunctional Materials

Welcome, Zhenwu.

The Levkin Lab just reached 100 journal publications. Congratulations to all group members and all of our collaborators.

Three projects have been funded by the Ministry of Science and Art of Baden-Württemberg (MWK). One project (PI Dr. Anna Popova) is a strong collaboration with the University Hospital in Heidelberg (Dr. Sascha Dietrich) and will focus on the development of a novel personalized medicine approach to address cancer treatment. The other two projects focus on further development of different aspects of the droplet microarray platform for cell screenings and mass-spectrometric readouts. We also thank and congratulate our collaborator - the group of Prof. Carsten Hopf (HS Mannheim/CeMOS). Congratulations to Anna, Max and Dorothea!

Have a look at this nice cover for our recent Advanced Functional Materials paper:

Welcome!

The manuscript titled "Solid-phase combinatorial synthesis using microarrays of microcompartments with light-induced on-chip cell screening" will be online soon - congratulations to Alisa and all of her co-authors!!!

Congratulations to the whole team of Aquarray, especially Simon and Anna, for winning an important EU grant (SME Instruments) of about 1,7M€! This grant will accelerate Aquarray´s development of precision medicine products and will help enter the market of Personalized Medicine. It is especially exciting to receive such an award where success rate is just about 3-5%...

https://www.clustercollaboration.eu/news/h2020-call-proposals-sme-instrument

We are happy that KIT was selected as one of the 11 Universities of Excellence. A total of approximately €148 million will be available annually for all Universities of Excellence.

I congratulate all our colleagues at the KIT and especially all the students, postdocs and TAs who worked in our group and made their contribution to this success.

Other Universities of Excellence include: RWTH Aachen University, Berlin University, University of Bonn, Dresden University of Technology, University of Hamburg, Heidelberg University, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, University of Konstanz, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Technical University of Munich, University of Tübingen.

Our new group picture for 2019 is out! As evidenced by the crowd - we keep on growing:

We are glad to congratulate Max Benz for receiving the 3^rd prize for his chemBIOS approach at the NEULAND Innovation Competition at the KIT yesterday.

Welcome!

Check out our paper in Nature Communications: “Marrying chemistry with biology by combining on-chip solution-based combinatorial synthesis and cellular screening”. Great paper highlighting the importance of interdisciplinary research. Congrats Max and all co-authors!

Check out our new paper in AFM. We demonstrate rapid photodegradability of commonly used polymethacrylate hydrogels without the need to incorporate additional photolabile functionalities.

Check this excellent special issue of Advanced Materials about materials research at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Lots of exciting research!

Great talks by Simon, Anna and Max at SLAS Europe in Barcelona!

Please, read about the experiences of our former intern student Helena Valquier-Flynn from Doane University during her stay at KIT here. 

Please, check out our newest paper on tumor spheroid formation in 100 nL droplets!

Yanxi, Alisa and Pavel were representing the Levkin lab with posters and talks at the 6th International Conference on Multifunctional, Hybrid and Nanomaterials in Sitges, Spain.

Find out more how to use patterned slippery surfaces to manipulate the paths of droplets and sort them according to size in our recent publication in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.

Recently we discovered that bacteria grown on micropatterns of repellent and adhesive properties (SLIPS+adhesive) form biofilm bridges, thin biofilm strings, connecting separated biofilm clusters. It is interesting that bacteria form networks of such biofilm bridges and these bridges are packed with highly metabolically active bacteria. Here is our paper in Advanced Science about this novel phenomenon. Congratulations to Wenxi Lei and coauthors. Great collaboration with Thomas Schwartz´s group at KIT.