Related papers: Directly measuring single molecule heterogeneity u…
A method is presented that, when used in conjunction with single molecule experimental techniques, allows for the extraction of rates and mechanical properties of a biomolecule undergoing transitions between mechanically distinct states.…
A protein undergoes conformational dynamics with multiple time scales, which results in fluctuating enzyme activities. Recent studies in single molecule enzymology have observe this "age-old" dynamic disorder phenomenon directly. However,…
The connection between the properties of cell tissue and those of the single constituent cells remains to be elucidated. At the purely mechanical level, the degree of rigidity of different cellular components, such as the nucleus and the…
Optical tweezers have enabled important insights into intracellular transport through the investigation of motor proteins, with their ability to manipulate particles at the microscale, affording femto Newton force resolution. Its use to…
The analysis of live-cell single-molecule imaging experiments can reveal valuable information about the heterogeneity of transport processes and interactions between cell components. These characteristics are seen as motion changes in the…
A theoretical analysis of the unfolding pathway of simple modular proteins in length- controlled pulling experiments is put forward. Within this framework, we predict the first module to unfold in a chain of identical units, emphasizing the…
Adherent cells exert traction forces on to their environment, which allows them to migrate, to maintain tissue integrity, and to form complex multicellular structures. This traction can be measured in a perturbation-free manner with…
Single molecule mechanical unfolding experiments are beginning to provide profiles of the complex energy landscape of biomolecules. In order to obtain reliable estimates of the energy landscape characteristics it is necessary to combine the…
Current efforts in the biomedical sciences and related interdisciplinary fields are focused on gaining a molecular understanding of health and disease, which is a problem of daunting complexity that spans many orders of magnitude in…
In recent years, single molecule force techniques have opened a new avenue to decipher the folding landscapes of biopolymers by allowing us to watch and manipulate the dynamics of individual proteins and nucleic acids. In single molecule…
Single-molecule tracking is a powerful way to look at the dynamic organization of plasma membranes. However, there are some limitations to its use. For example, it was recently observed, using numerical simulation, that time-averaging…
Electronic transport properties for single-molecule junctions have been widely measured by several techniques, including mechanically controllable break junctions, electromigration break junctions or by means of scanning tunneling…
Protein function does not solely depend on structure but often relies on dynamical transitions between distinct conformations. Despite this fact, our ability to characterize or predict protein dynamics is substantially less developed…
Stretching of a protein by a fluid flow is compared to that in a force-clamp apparatus. The comparison is made within a simple topology-based dynamical model of a protein in which the effects of the flow are implemented using Langevin…
We describe a simple automated method to extract and quantify transient heterogeneous dynamical changes from large datasets generated in single molecule/particle tracking experiments. Based on wavelet transform, the method transforms raw…
Investigations of molecular bonds between single molecules and molecular complexes by the dynamic force spectroscopy are subject to large fluctuations at nanoscale and possible other aspecific binding, which mask the experimental output.…
The effect of sequence heterogeneity on polynucleotide translocation across a pore and on simple models of molecular motors such as helicases, DNA polymerase/exonuclease and RNA polymerase is studied in detail. Pore translocation of RNA or…
Modelling of single cellulose fibres is usually performed by assuming homogenous properties, such as strength and Young s modulus, for the whole fibre. Additionally, the inhomogeneity in size and swelling behaviour along the fibre is often…
Many biological processes are supported by special molecules, called motor proteins or molecular motors, that transport cellular cargoes along linear protein filaments and can reversibly associate to their tracks. Stimulated by these…
Understanding how monomeric proteins fold under in vitro conditions is crucial to describing their functions in the cellular context. Significant advances both in theory and experiments have resulted in a conceptual framework for describing…