Event Date
Paul R. Selvin, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Physics and Biophysics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, presents "Single-Molecule Super-Resolution Fluorescence: Application to Proteins Walking, to Memory, and to Alzheimer’s Disease".
We study single molecules with fluorescence microscopy which can achieve nanometer accuracy—called FIONA— or similarly, nanometer resolution—called PALM, STORM, or PAINT. This is 10-100x better than conventional fluorescence and won a Nobel Prize in 2014. We will introduce what the techniques are, recent advances (including a new fluorescence technique called MinFlux which enables nanometer resolution in under a millisecond), and new methods of labelling proteins for observing neurons in live mouse brain slices. For the first application, we will show that certain proteins, known as “molecular motors”, literally walk on tiny roadways, carrying biological cargoes throughout the cell, taking steps of 16.8 nm, or more recently, taking ½-steps using MinFlux. We have also discovered how dynein, one type of molecular motor, takes a unique “back-step”. For the second application, we discuss neuroscience, and how your memory works—and what happens when diseases, like Alzheimer’s disease, takes over. We can “see” memory work with nanometer resolution in isolated brain slices, show an increase in certain proteins (AMPAR) with memory, and record what is happening just before Alzheimer’s disease sets in.
Hosts: Kassandra Ori (kassandra.ori@gmail.com),
Yale E. Goldman (yegoldman@ucdavis.edu),
& Richard J. McKenney (rjmckenney@ucdavis.edu)