SMDNA : Novel approaches to the study of enzymatic diffusion on single DNA molecules.

In cells, enzymes are able to locate and sequence specifically bind to short regions of DNA in a compacted genome of many millions of bases. This project will investigate the mechanism by which they achieve this remarkable feat by examining the behavior of single enzymes diffusing on single DNA molecules. The project will focus on two main objectives. The first is to exploit novel DNA-labeling technology to investigate, for the first time at the single molecule level, the effect of DNA topology on the diffusion of enzymes. Since genetic DNA is highly compacted and adopts plectonemic structures, the study of enzymatic diffusion on supercoiled DNA molecules is critical to our understanding of how enzymes interact with DNA in the cell. The second objective is to investigate the relationship between enzymatic structure and the method used by an enzyme to move on the DNA duplex. This will be done by directly visualizing structurally well-characterized enzymes as they move on a single DNA molecule.

Keywords:Single molecule spectroscopy, enzymatics, DNA, fluorescence

Disciplines:Inorganic chemistry, Organic chemistry, Theoretical and computational chemistry, Other chemical sciences