Page 91 - CIBERBBN-2015-eng

• Determination of the thermodynamics of nucleic acids to high resolution.
• Dynamic force spectroscopy and molecular im- printing methods.
• Thermodynamics of small systems and systems out of equilibrium.
• Molecular Motors.
• Experiments of molecular evolution and recogni- tion with single molecule techniques.
Most relevant scientific articles
Research groups
RIBEZZI-CRIVELLARI M., ALEMANY A., RITORT F. Universal axial fluctuations in optical tweezers. Optics Letters. 2015;40(5):800-803.
CAMUNAS-SOLER J., MANOSAS M., FRUTOS S., TULLA-PU- CHE J., ALBERICIO F., RITORT F. Single-molecule kinetics and footprinting of DNA bis-intercalation: The paradig- matic case of Thiocoraline. Nucleic Acids Research. 2015;43(5):2767-2779.
DE LORENZO S., RIBEZZI-CRIVELLARI M., ARIAS-GONZáLEZ J.R., SMITH S.B., RITORT F. A Temperature-Jump Optical Trap for Single-Molecule Manipulation. Biophysical Jour- nal. 2015;108(12):2854-2864.
Highlights
Among the most important results of our group in 2015 should be noted that:
We have developed a single molecule footprinting technique molecule, which allows to identify the power and the binding site of ligands to DNA. We have shown that the force spectroscopy technique is usefull to determine the kinetics of binding of small molecules to DNA, for example in the case of anticancer peptide Thiocoraline. In addition, we have developed a set of methodologies and tech- niques that allow us to identify like this molecule binds to the double helix at specific positions us- ing unzipping experiments. This technique is being used for studying the interaction of another mole- cules to DNA, as Netropsin or dendrimers. The re- sults are the starting point for collaborations with PharmaMar or the Dendrimer Group for Biomedical Applications of CIBER-BBN.
We have demonstrated experimentally that it is pos- sible to measure violations of fluctuation-dissipa-
ALEMANY A., RIBEZZI-CRIVELLARI M., RITORT F. From free energy measurements to thermodynamic inference in nonequilibrium small systems. New Journal of Physics. 2015;17(7).
DIETERICH E., CAMUNAS-SOLER J., RIBEZZI-CRIVELLARI M., SEIFERT U., RITORT F. Single-molecule measurement of the effective temperature in non-equilibrium steady states. Nature Physics. 2015;11(11):971-977.
tion theorem and extract the effective temperature in small non-equilibrium systems. This result is very important because it opens the possibility of under- standing the theory of disordered systems using small molecule systems only.
We have improved a new instrument of optical tweezers with temperature controller to measure between 5 and 40 °C, which is essential for enthalpy and entropy unzipping measurements.
We have been working on expanding our experimen- tal capabilities at the level of individual cells through the development of new experimental methods and data analysis techniques.
And finally, we have taken the first steps of a new line of research related to the fundamental problem of molecular evolution in order to better understand the physical principles that describe the growing complexity and diversity of mutant molecular pop- ulations.
Institution: Universitat de Barcelona · Contact: Facultad de Física. Dpto. de Física Fundamental. Avda. Diagonal 647. 08028 Barcelona · E.mail: [email protected] · Website: http://www.ffn.ub.es/ritort
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