SKM 2023 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 5: Focus Session NanoAgents

BP 5.1: Hauptvortrag

Montag, 27. März 2023, 15:00–15:30, TOE 317

Repurposing nucleic acids as high-resolution force sensors: From fundamental mechanotransduction to translational biophysics — •Khalid Salaita — Emory University, Department of Chemistry, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Cells are highly dynamic structures that are constantly converting chemical energy into mechanical work to pull and push on one another and on their surroundings. These pulls and pushes are mediated by tiny molecular forces at the scale of tens of piconewtons. For context, 7 pN applied a distance of 1 nm is ~1 kcal/mol. Nonetheless, these forces can have profound biochemical consequences. For example, the rapidly fluctuating forces between immune cells and their targets can drastically tune immune response and function. Despite the importance of mechanics there are limited methods to study forces at the molecular scale and particularly within living cells.

In this talk, I will discuss my group's efforts at addressing this gap in knowledge by developing tools to map the molecular forces applied by cells. I will describe the development of a suite of DNA tension probes which offer significant improvements in S/N and lead to enhanced spatial and temporal resolution. I will also describe a series of force-triggered reactions that enable signal amplification. Fluorescence polarization spectroscopy and super-resolution imaging offer the highest resolution maps of cell traction forces reported to date. Finally, armed with these new tools, I will describe the advent of translational mechanobiology where we predict the bleeding risk in patients by measuring the mechanical activity of their platelet adhesion receptors.