München 2004 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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PV: Plenarvorträge

PV XX

PV XX: Plenarvortrag

Freitag, 26. März 2004, 09:45–10:30, Aula

Biological systems as nano-engineered systems — •Steven Chu — Physics Department, Stanford University, USA

The study of biological systems at the molecular scale may teach us lessons that may be useful for nano-scale engineering: many of the molecular scale systems found in biology are impressive. Given the billions of years of development time for bugs (bacteria) to engineer the No-dqbugsNo-dq out of their systems, it may worthwhile to learn about how biology goes about its business at the molecular scale. I will describe biology solutions to two engineering challenges: how an enzyme efficiently cleaves a covalent bond [1], and how the ribosome is able to accurately read messenger RNA and translate this message into the string of amino acid chains that fold into a protein [2].

In order to develop a mechanistic understanding of these biological systems function, we used fluorescence microscopy with photon counting sensitivity to follow the internal motion of individual bio-molecules and how they interact with other molecules. The ability to observe transient states and dynamical fluctuations have enabled us to discover new biological states and link the wealth of structural and biochemical data to create mechanistic models of enzyme activity.
The Relationship between Structural Dynamics and Function of a RNA enzyme - A Single Molecule Study of the Hairpin Ribozyme, Xiaowei Zhuang, Harold Kim, Miguel Pereira, Hazen P. Babcock, Nils Walter, Steven Chu, Science 296, 1473-1476 (2002).
Unpublished work done with Scott Blanchard, Ruben Gonzales, Harold Kim, and Jody Puglisi.