new & notable
Casey Londergan | February 22, 2010Some science here from the late am: saw two very slick new and notable talks. I am most enthusiastic about new techniques with promising futures, and saw two of these today, both of the optical variety. One: Christopher Voigt’s lab has demonstrated a two-color optical method for turning a regulatory network on and off. Combination of very slick molecular biology and optical imaging. Two: Thomas Perkins’ lab has figured out how to do very sensitive AFM-pulling experiments on membrane proteins without the problems of drift and lack of spatial fidelity that have plagues these measurements. the trick is to use a hybrid optical trap/AFM measurement. very nice extension of force-unfolding measurements to multi-domain integral membrane proteins, even with high time resolution. their data are so nice I may have to put this in my pchem class for next year! (Single molecular pulling experiments are a wonderful bridge from statistical mechanics to classical thermodynamics using non-PV variables, and these are very nice data).
these were in a huge room, so no room-denial issues here (but my fellow bloggers have reported some issues elsewhere…)