Colloquium Natural and Life Sciences - Gerhard Stock

Proteins in Motion

As noted by Richard Feynman, biology can be explained by understanding the wiggling and jiggling of atoms. Indeed, the motions of biomolecular systems such as proteins and DNA is  -besides the structure-  a major discriminant for their function. Since these motions occur on timescales from picoseconds (10^-12 s) up to, say minutes, it‘s been a long-standing challenge to develop experimental and computational tools to observe these dynamics.

As an introduction to our current FRIAS project group „Accessing protein dynamics on all timescales“ of B. Hermann, T. Hugel, S. Wolf and myself, I will give a quite basic introduction on modern spectroscopic and computational techniques such as smFRET microscopy and molecular dynamics simulations.  In particular, the latter approach allows us to visualize and illustrate elementary biophysical processes such as the folding and binding as well as signal transport of proteins.