Optical Tweezers to Force Information out of Biological and Synthetic Systems One Molecule at a Time
2022
Rebeca Bocanegra | María Ortiz-Rodríguez | Ismael Plaza Garcia-Abadillo | Carlos R-Pulido | Borja Ibarra
Over the last few decades, in vitro single-molecule manipulation techniques have enabled the use of force and displacement as controlled variables in biochemistry. Measuring the effect of mechanical force on the real-time kinetics of a biological process gives us access to the rates, equilibrium constants and free-energy landscapes of the mechanical steps of the reaction; this information is not accessible by ensemble assays. Optical tweezers are the current method of choice in single-molecule manipulation due to their versatility, high force and spatial and temporal resolutions. The aim of this review is to describe the contributions of our lab in the single-molecule manipulation field. We present here several optical tweezers assays refined in our laboratory to probe the dynamics and mechano-chemical properties of biological molecular motors and synthetic molecular devices at the single-molecule level.
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