SCIENCE AT THE EDGE SEMINAR

Friday, 01 April 2011 at 11:30am

Room 1400 Biomedical and Physical Sciences Bldg.

Refreshments at 11:15

* CANCELLED *

Speaker: X. Sunney Xie
         Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University

Title:   Life at the Single Molecule Level

Abstract:

In a living cell, gene expression - the transcription of DNA to messenger RNA
followed by translation to protein - occurs stochastically, as a consequence of
the low copy number of DNA and mRNA molecules involved. Can one monitor these
processes in a living cell in real time?  How do cells with identical genes
exhibit different phenotypes?  Recent advances in single-molecule imaging in
living bacterial cells allow these questions to be answered at the molecular
level in a quantitative manner. It was found that rare events of single
molecules can have important biological consequences.