haha, first after seeing this post I went to read all of her
papers by 2011. now I'm back to say the quality of the work
is sound, and indeed quite interesting stories.
I was first impressed by this seasaw motif which is quite a
genius idea and if she came up with it, she is truly a
smartie.But this idea seems exist since a former Phd student
(including some sequence predication work) from the lab so I
felt she is quite lucky to be given a promising direction
(or low hanging fruits) to test it further---after all you
need luck to succeed in a field. Now I understand where her
luck is from. Still, fair enough, this is the way the world
runs.
Putting all the xjdh aside, I'm not convinced about the real
significance of such work: neither bring new understanding
of nucleic acids--instead prove how amazing the
thermodynamic knowledge of DNA from decades ago, nor being
practical--such displacement design is doomed to struggle
between accuracy(long sequence) and speed(slow kinetics for
long seq)and thus cannot scale up to any level of true
usefulness. Now 8hrs waiting for the ~100 strand "neuron" to
respond, soon will be days and years for anything more
complex. Maybe flashy enough for grants, but not worth of a
priority in biomedical research.
