MvL-Kolloquium: Prof. Dr. Toshio Ando

Proteins are linear polymers made of 20 kinds of amino acids. Our vital activities, from muscle contraction to visual sensation, and even to memory and learning, are all dependent on such polymers in aqueous environments. Therefore, deciphering how proteins function is a key to understanding life and diseases. An important question is how to decipher this. Proteins are dynamic in nature and work at the single-molecule level. These biomolecules fluctuate in time between different conformations, bind to and dissociate from interaction partners, traverse a range of energy and chemical states, and generate forces during their functional activity. For such vital substances, directly observing individual molecules in dynamic action is the most straightforward approach. To this end, I have developed high-speed atomic force microscopy. This microscopy can produce molecular movies, from which mechanistic insights into biological processes can be provided. In this lecture, I will show molecular movies of some proteins to demonstrate how well their molecular machinery is designed.