Physics of Life Group Away Day 2022
Life, one molecule at a time
Transformative research at the physical-life sciences interface
The Physics of Life Group led by Professor Mark Leake comprises research themes of transformative experimental, theoretical and computational biophysics tools and techniques to address outstanding questions in the life sciences, explore new physics and physical principles inspired by biology, and engineer bionanotechnology tools for applications in biomedicine, synthetic biology and bioengineering. We focus at a precision of single biomolecules using these innovative biophysics approaches and concepts, but use these to enable new insight into high length and time scales manifest as emergent properties in living cells and tissues.
These tools include a range of high-precision home-built optical microscopy instrumentation including total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy, single-molecule Forster Resonance Energy Transfer (smFRET), variable-angle epifluorescence/HILO, optical tweezers and magnetic tweezers (COMBI-Tweez), and rapid millisecond single-molecule imaging using Slimfield and SlimVar. These are integrated with advanced control software that we write ourselves, and synchronised microfluidics that we build ourselves.
Our core remit is to motivate rich and creative dialogues with the life sciences to understand what open questions are limited by existing technology, and to develop new tools and approaches to overcome these limitations.
A key focus of the team is to explore how symmetry breaking at a molecular scale leads to biologically crucial emergent properties, exemplied by two remarkable model systems:
- Understanding how mesoscale biomolecular condensates form from constituent molecular interactions, using powerful model native systems such as the aggresome found exclusely in bacteria.
- Investigating the formation of complexity in nucleic acid molecular topology through emergent structures formed via mechanical peturbations and interactions with proteins which manipulate nucleic acid topology.
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