Inaugural Armendarez Lecture Series with Professor Carlos Bustamante from UC Berkeley at 11:00am

The advent of single molecule force spectroscopy represents the introduction of forces, torques, and displacements as controlled variables in biochemistry. These methods afford the direct manipulation of individual molecules to interrogate the forces that hold together their structure, the forces and torques that these molecules generate in the course of their biochemical reactions, and the use of force, torque, and displacement as tools to investigate the mechanisms of these reactions. Because of their microscopic nature, the signals detected in these experiments are often dominated by fluctuations, which, in turn, play an important role in the mechanisms that underlie the operation of the molecular machines of the cell. Their direct observation and quantification in single molecule experiments provide a unique window to investigate those mechanisms, as well as a convenient way to investigate fundamental new fluctuation theorems of statistical mechanics that bridge the equilibrium and non-equilibrium realms of this discipline. In this talk I will make a semi-historical presentation of how the various developments occurred in my laboratory. I will describe various results from the elasticity of DNA, the mechanical unfolding of RNA and protein molecules, and the characterization of various molecular machines.

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Dr. Bustamante is a professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Chemistry, and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair of Biophysics at University of California, Berkeley. He is also a biophysics faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Carlos Bustamante is interested in the dynamics and mechanochemical properties of molecular motors such as the packaging motor of bacteriophage Phi 29 and the operation of RNA polymerase and the ribosome during transcription and translation, respectively. In particular, his laboratory is investigating the physical basis of transcription regulation by the nucleosomal barrier. His laboratory is also interested in the process of protein folding and, more specifically, the co-translational folding of nascent polypeptides. To this end, Bustamante and his team develop and apply novel methods of single-molecule manipulation and detection, such as optical tweezers, magnetic tweezers, and single-molecule fluorescence microscopy.