Speaker: Paul Selvin
TITLE: "FIONA looks at individual molecular motors walk and run."ABSTRACT: Molecular Motors are tiny naturally occurring machines. Therejob is to carry all sorts of biomolecules--things like RNA, neuropeptides, chromosomes…-- throughout the cell. They do this be a “hand-over-hand” mechanism, i.e. they walk, over cellular highways (known as actin and microtubules). We have discovered that they walk by a technique called Fluorescence Imaging with One Nanometer Accuracy (FIONA), which amazingly, is able to monitor steps as short as 8 nm. In the cell, because there is plenty of food (known as ATP), to power them, they run, i.e. the move very rapidly.
BIOGRAPHY: Paul Selvin received his Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley in 1990 and is now a professor of physics and biophysics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In between, he was a contributing writer for Science magazine and several other magazines, where he wrote stories on the latest scientific advances and controversies in the field. In his research career, he has been interested in making quantitative measurements of biological molecules. He started studying DNA, and then switched to cytoplasmic molecular motors. These are tiny motors, some of which carry chromosomes around the cell during replication, others are responsible for muscle contraction, and still others transport packets of neurotransmitters. Where do they get the energy for this? How do they move? More recently he has also focused on ion channels, membrane proteins which are responsible for how you think.