Single Molecule Fluorescence Studies of Antibody Structure

Plasmonic band structure controls single-molecule fluorescence.

Plasmonics and photonic crystals are two complementary approaches to tailor single-emitter fluorescence, using strong local field enhancements near metals on one hand and spatially extended photonic band structure effects on the other hand. Here, we explore the emergence of spontaneous emission control by finite-sized hexagonal arrays of nanoapertures milled in gold film. We demonstrate that al...

Single-molecule fluorescence studies of Protein Folding and Molecular Chaperones

Folding of newly synthesized proteins is an essential part of protein biosynthesis and misfolding can result in protein aggregation which can also lead to several severe diseases. Protein folding is a highly heterogeneous process and rarely populated intermediate states may play an important role. Single-molecule techniques are ideally suited to resolve these heterogeneities. In this thesis, I ...

Single-molecule fluorescence studies of protein folding and conformational dynamics.

SnapShot: Single-Molecule Fluorescence

Common uorescent agents include organic uorophores (e.g., Cy5), uorescent proteins (e.g., GFP), and semiconductor quantum dots each with different size, photobleaching, blinking, and labeling ef ciency properties. Wideeld detection with EMCCD camera enables parallel measurements. The temporal resolution is >ms, and the working concentration is limited to nM or less. Confocal detection from an e...

Homebuilt single-molecule scanning confocal fluorescence microscope studies of single DNA/protein interactions.

Many technical improvements in fluorescence microscopy over the years have focused on decreasing background and increasing the signal to noise ratio (SNR). The scanning confocal fluorescence microscope (SCFM) represented a major improvement in these efforts. The SCFM acquires signal from a thin layer of a thick sample, rejecting light whose origin is not in the focal plane thereby dramatically ...