Single Molecule Research Or When Biology Meets Physics

Title: Single Molecule Research Or When Biology Meets Physics.
When: Wednesday, April 5, 2017, at 12:00.
Place: Sala de Conferencias, Módulo 00, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
Speaker: Fèlix Ritort, Facultat de Física, Departament de Física de la Materia Condensada, Universitat de Barcelona, and Ciber-BBN of Biomaterials and Nanomedicine, ISCIII, Madrid, Spain.

Nonequilibrium pervades in nature. From living cells to the expanding universe virtually all energy processes in nature occur in nonequilibrium conditions [1]. The possibility of using electromagnetic fields to exert forces in the range of the piconewton has spurred the development of new experimental techniques such as optical tweezers that are capable of manipulating single molecules with unprecedented accuracy [2]. In this talk I will present recent investigations carried out in my lab that combine the finest tools from statistical physics with single molecule data to characterize energy and information fluctuations in nucleic acids and proteins [3,4]. These experiments lay the ground to explore new physical concepts and tools [5,6] essential for our understanding of nonequilibrium phenomena in physics and beyond [7].

References

1. F. Ritort, Nonequilibrium fluctuations in small systems: from physics to biology, Advances in Chemical Physics, 137, 31-123 (2008). Ed. Stuart. A. Rice, Wiley publications.
2. F. Ritort, Single molecule experiments in biological physics: methods and applications, Journal of Physics C (Condensed Matter),18 (2006) R531-R583.
3. A. Alemany, A. Mossa, I. Junier and F. Ritort, Experimental free-energy measurements of kinetic molecular states using fluctuation theorems, Nature Physics, 8 (2012) 688-694.
4. J. Camunas-Soler, A. Alemany and F. Ritort, Experimental measurement of binding energy, selectivity, and allostery using fluctuation theorems, Science 355, (2017), 412-415 (2017).
5. M. Ribezzi-Crivellari and F. Ritort, Free-energy inference from partial work measurements in small systems, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111 (2014) E3386-E3394.
6. A. Alemany, M. Ribezzi-Crivellari and F. Ritort. From free energy measurements to thermodynamic inference in nonequilibrium small systems. New Journal of Physics, 17 (2015) 075009.
7. E. Dieterich, J. Camuñas-Soler, M. Ribezzi-Crivellari, U. Seifert and F. Ritort. Single-molecule measurement of the effective temperature in non-equilibrium steady states. Nature Physics, 11 (2015) 971-97.