Adventures With Single Molecules and SARS-CoV-2

Inselhalle

Main Hall

Moderator: Peter Brzezinski
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Sweden

In this talk, I will first describe my early life in education and science, highlighting ways I am similar to many young scientists at this meeting. My interests moved from electrical engineering and mathematics in college, to physics of light and molecules in solids in graduate school. Getting a job at IBM Research opened new doors, because we were storing digital bits in the optical properties of groups of molecules in solids. Thinking about the signal to noise of a recorded bit led to the first optical detection of a single molecule by light in 1989, at liquid helium temperatures.

Due to the work of many researchers, the field of single molecules and light exploded worldwide by expanding to room temperature and biology. Surprisingly, single molecules were observed to blink on and off, and this plus several other active control schemes led to super-resolution imaging beyond the diffraction limit with single molecules. Today, using super-resolution microscopy, we can observe the nanoscale organization of viral RNA and proteins in SARS-CoV-2 infected cells, which form amazing patterns at special centers for replication and transcription.