What Single-Molecule Biophysics can Offer?

Hung-Wen Li^1*

¹Department of Chemistry, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

* Presenter:Hung-Wen Li, email:hwli@ntu.edu.tw

Recent technique development has allowed us to visualize individual molecules under the optical microscope in real-time. This provides scientists with new tools to discover new molecular events that were typically averaged out in conventional cellular or biochemical studies. My laboratory has developed single-molecule optical imaging platforms to monitor protein-DNA interactions in real-time. These platforms include tethered particle motion (TPM), single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), multi-color fluorescence colocalization (CoSMoS), and optical tweezers (OT) experiments. These optical imaging tools offer different spatiotemporal resolutions that allow us to monitor biological events with unprecedented molecular details. Through collaboration with several labs both in Taiwan and internationally, we have developed single-molecule biophysical chemistry experiments to elucidate the functional and regulatory mechanism for the assembly of DNA recombinases on DNA. I will discuss how these single-molecule experiments help to address key mechanistic details of important biological events.

Keywords: Single-molecule biophysics, FRET, DNA enzymes