Single-molecule biophysics articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • Article
    | Open Access

    ATPases can cyclically convert free energy into mechanical work. Now, it is shown that the GTPase Rab5 can also perform mechanical work as part of a two-component molecular motor with the tethering protein EEA1.

    • Anupam Singh
    • , Joan Antoni Soler
    •  & Shashi Thutupalli

  • News & Views |

    Watching a single protein molecule fold for days reveals rare excursions into configurations that were previously hidden from observation by high energy barriers.

    • Krishna Neupane
    •  & Michael T. Woodside

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    A DNA-binding protein condenses on DNA via a switch-like transition. Surface condensation occurs at preferential DNA locations suggesting collective sequence readout and enabling sequence-specificity robustness with respect to protein concentration.

    • Jose A. Morin
    • , Sina Wittmann
    •  & Stephan W. Grill

  • News & Views |

    Single-molecule experiments can now quantify the surface forces that compete to package tethered DNA into a protein-rich condensate — providing much-needed mechanistic insight into the phase behaviour of the entangled genome in the nucleus.

    • Marina Feric

  • Article |

    A study of the dynamics of polymer translocation through synthetic nanopores provides a direct observation of tension propagation—a non-equilibrium description of the process of unfolding that a polymer undergoes during translocation.

    • Kaikai Chen
    • , Ining Jou
    •  & Nicholas A. W. Bell

  • Letter |

    The motor protein dynein is associated with microtubule force generation in the cell; how it interacts with cytoskeletal fluctuations is still an open question. Here the authors show that dynein can harness these fluctuations to generate power and move faster towards the minus-end of microtubules.

    • Yasin Ezber
    • , Vladislav Belyy
    •  & Ahmet Yildiz

  • Letter |

    A continuous version of the Maxwell demon is a machine that repeatedly monitors a system, but extracts work only on state change. Arbitrarily large quantities of work can thus be extracted, as demonstrated by DNA hairpin pulling experiments.

    • M. Ribezzi-Crivellari
    •  & F. Ritort

  • News & Views |

    Single-molecule techniques have long given us insight into the motion and interactions of individual molecules. But simulations now show that the dynamics inside single proteins is not as simple as we thought — and that proteins are forever changing.

    • Ralf Metzler

  • News & Views |

    Technologies aimed at single-molecule resolution of non-equilibrium systems increasingly require sophisticated new ways of thinking about thermodynamics. An elegant extension to standard fluctuation theory grants access to the kinetic intermediate states of these systems — as DNA-pulling experiments now demonstrate.

    • Jan Liphardt

  • Article |

    Short-lived kinetic states between equilibria are difficult to access experimentally, despite being crucial in many dynamical processes. Single-molecule experiments demonstrate that an extended fluctuation relation allows extraction of the free energies of these metastable states under non-equilibrium conditions.

    • Anna Alemany
    • , Alessandro Mossa
    •  & Felix Ritort

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