Working with solitary-molecule optical and AFM imaging and power-spectroscopy approaches, we look for to unravel the mechanistic aspects of the framework and dynamics of chromosomes. Our analysis passions involve:
Human Rad51 filaments on double- and one-stranded DNA: correlating normal and irregular forms with recombination operate.
[Laughs] ‘It had been absolutely an incredible possibility! At time, I had been very well conscious that it could go Improper and that I could develop into much less thriving, but I just disregarded that. Curiosity has always been my strongest driving force. And fortunately all of it labored out.’
Our get the job done was promptly followed up by Other individuals, most notably by Phaedon Avouris and colleagues at IBM, who in October 1998 released their conclusions on transistors made from single- and multi-walled carbon nanotubes in Applied Physics Letters.
This yielded a breakthrough. Inside only some months, we were in a position to evaluate transportation by way of an individual single-walled carbon nanotube. Based on small-temperature experiments by a brilliant PhD scholar in my group, Sander Tans (now a valued colleague and professor at Delft College of Technological innovation with the Lively study lab at AMOLF in Amsterdam), we confirmed that carbon nanotubes were being real quantum wires with very prolonged (micrometres) electronic coherence lengths — confirming theoretical predictions of metallic conduct.
Our research ranges from the biophysics of DNA to artificial cells and further than. Please take a look below at the spectrum of our existing assignments.
All parameters were precisely the same for every panel Within this movie, aside from the First placement of the 6hb rod (proven in blue) to the nanopore. Simulations that terminated early due to translocation in the rod from the pore are marked by a gray history.
Learning DNA loop extrusion by SMC proteins for chromosome architecture with one-molecule assays.
Imagine if, as an alternative to utilizing regular best-down silicon electronics, transistors can be created from the bottom up applying solitary organic and natural molecules since the switching factors? This concept, which became The premise of right now’s discipline of molecular electronics, very first emerged inside the nineteen seventies.
There was just one trouble though — we did not observe any measurable electrical conduction from the single polymer molecules. We concluded that at the single-molecule level, conducting polymers were really not this sort of wonderful conductors, which was relatively disappointing. We Consequently broadened our perspective to test to uncover extra promising molecules.
An integrated microfluidic platform for quantifying drug permeation across biomimetic vesicle membranes
Quite a few new phenomena have been found, and he and his research team proven a leading situation On this field of exploration. Dekker and his analysis group learned new physics of nanotubes along with explored the feasibility of molecular electronics. In 1998, they were the 1st to construct a transistor according to only one nanotube molecule.
2005, discovery of your mechanism of DNA uncoiling by topoisomerase enzymes; discovery of very long-variety conformational improvements in Mre11/DNA restore complexes; and initially force measurements on the DNA molecule inside of a nanopore
Last but not least, I'll briefly sketch many of our ideas to investigate the developing of artificial cells, specifically our initial ceesdekker.net measures to ascertain synthetic cell division.