Single molecule techniques comprise a set of experimental methods that detect, manipulate, and analyze individual biomolecules or molecular complexes, circumventing ensemble averaging and revealing heterogeneity in structure, dynamics, and function. Core modalities include single-molecule fluorescence (e.g., smFRET, TIRF microscopy), optical and magnetic tweezers, atomic force microscopy, and nanopore-based sensing. These techniques enable direct measurement of forces, conformational changes, binding/unbinding events, and reaction pathways with nanometer spatial and millisecond (or better) temporal resolution. They are widely applied to study nucleic acid–protein interactions, molecular motors, enzyme kinetics, folding energy landscapes, and mechanotransduction at the level of individual molecules.
Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) permits multidisciplinary trace analyses and the potential detection of single molecules. Shi Bai and Koji Sugioka from RIKEN report a comprehensive review of recent progress in strategies ...
Nanomaterials
Jun 28, 2021
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105
It took 13 years and one billion dollars to sequence the human genome, an enormous scientific undertaking that launched a new era of medicine. With today's advances in sequencing technology, that same task would have only ...
Nanomaterials
Jun 25, 2021
0
343
