Deciphering biological complexity with single-molecule resolution

Speaker: Professor Dina Grohmann, University of Regensburg, Germany

Abstract:
Our research is focused on biological machineries that are involved in transcriptional and posttranscriptional regulation of gene expression. In order to explore the structure-function-dynamics relationship of the RNA polymerase and transcriptional complexes as well as the RNA-induced silencing complex we combine classical biochemistry with single-molecule measurements. Single-molecule biology has matured in recent years, driven to greater sophistication so that standard biochemical and molecular biology techniques often find a counterpart in the single-molecule fluorescence world. We continuously work on the expansion of the “single-molecule laboratory” as a single-molecule experiment is often much richer in information revealing dynamics, subpopulations, intermediate states, structural changes and the stoichiometry of a biomolecular complex. I will present examples from our recent research that demonstrate how the single-molecule approach helped us to understand molecular complexity often obscured in ensemble measurements.