Hello everybody in nature network. Welcome to my blog! I am Lei, studying biophysics, particularly on single molecule detection. I am originally from China, but having my graduate education in Europe. I had one year experience with optical trapping in Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. The research project is about using optical tweezers to study the motion of a single protein in the Escherichia coli outer membrane and its binding stiffness to the cell wall where the receptor is naturally anchored. I am currently visiting Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces to work on an optical trap setup to allow the position detection of nanometer precision. After this, I will come to Royal Institute of Technology as a PhD student to work presumably on fluorescence imaging and detection. A lot of activities will most probably be engaged in fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS), fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), total internal reflection (TIR), etc. for single molecule detection.
Personally, I am fascinated by what wealth of information can be brought by single molecules. Take FCS as an example, this technique primarily relies on thermal noises, by monitoring the fluorescence intensity fluctuations in a focal volume, one can 1) study the photodynamical properties of fluorescent dyes, such as its triplet state kinetics, photobleaching; 2) the translational and rotational diffusion of target molecules; 3) binding and unbinding kinetics of different molecules that people are interested in; 4) conformational fluctuations of biomolecules and so forth. I think single molecule detection is hot spot for study, and lots of interesting and exciting activities are getting blossomed. It is very crucial to understand molecule-molecule interactions, from which one might get some hint to uncover some fundamental mechanisms in biology. Also, more and more people are interested in understanding the origin of disease, e.g. cancers, from single molecular level, and thus early detection and diagnostics can be possible, and even further ways of curing the disease will be promising. But of course, to achieve such goals, single molecule study itself is not enough, since biology is far more complex, requiring not only the understanding of biology in single molecule level but also in a systematic way. But anyway, undoubtedly single molecule study is one important piece for the whole jigsaw game.
My blog will mainly cover this niche, talking about some interesting papers, new tools for study, and so forth. But I intend not to restrict my topics to these, because I believe any science discipline is not isolated from each other but interconnected, therefore I might also write something foreign but intriguing to me. To make the blog a bit more diverse and vivid, I might also present my personal perception of cultural, and educational differences between China and western countries. So the core of contents of my blog will be single molecule stuff, which will perhaps be coated with a layer of topics in other areas that I have interests and some protruding spikes made of cultural gradients. I am looking forward to your visits and discussions. Welcome to my site!
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Dance with single molecules by Lei Xu
The blog will mostly concentrate on biomolecular physics, specifically on single molecule detections.
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An introduction of myself and my blog
- Date:
- Friday, 03 Oct ober 2008 - 15:23 UTC
Last updated: Friday, 03 Oct 2008 - 15:23 UTC
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Comments
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Hey Lei,
Nice to emeet you and great you joined the bloggers. You might start using some paragraphs though ;-) Best,
B.
Welcome to NN, Lei! Now that you are a full-fledged NN blogger, you should join the “Nature Network Bloggers forum” to stay current with all our schemes.
I am really looking forward to reading more about your work. I turn into a complete geek when people start talking about single molecule techniques and optical tweezers, and all that. I recently wrote up a story about Antoine van Oijen that you may find interesting – he developed a single particle assay for influenza fusion. The first author even had to synthesize his own fluorescent dye, because the wavelength they required was not commercially available.
Looking forward to reading more about your work!
How have I not yet learned to preview my comments… Here is the link for the Nature Network Bloggers group. Sorry!
I am looking forward to more on single molecules and on your perspectives on China. Huanying!
To Sabine Hossenfelder:
I am learning how to use paragraphs. Actually, when I submitted the entry, I did add some vertical space between the paragraphs. I think there must be a simple trick to do this.
Welcome, Lei. As an ex-biophysicist, I am very pleased to see you here.
For a formatting guide, please see this post at the NN bloggers’ group Anna mentioned.
But paragraphs should be possible by using a simple carriage return (sorry, showing my age there, “enter”). If you want to, you can edit a post after you have posted it, I would not worry about it for this post but you might find that useful in future posts if you want to correct anything that you missed in preview. (Unfortunately, one cannot edit comments after posting, only posts.)
Turning to a more interesting topic ;-), I wonder if you have seen this Nature Methods web focus, which is free to access? If not, I think it is quite relevant to your area of resarch.
Best wishes, and looking forwards to future blog posts!
There is no special code for inserting lines between paragraphs. A simple ‘enter’ or ‘return’ does the trick nicely.
welcome, compatriots! Remember to join the Chinese researchers group
Welcome, Lei, you definitely will find more friends & interesting research topics here :-)
interesting! Specially for me who is really interested in pharmacodynamics. Thanks, hope to hear from you.
Hi, I envy you, Ley, because you could describe what you have done so interestingly. I once performed (was forced to perform by my boss) single-molecule spectroscopy, but I escaped, and one of our group members (he was a new comer) measured the fluorescence intensity trajectories (where X-axis was time in seconds), but, frankly he did not seem to enjoy it, and still I am not sure what he has detected was really from one “single” molecule. I wanted to believe the fluorescence was really really from single molecule, but, with a common sense for me, I thought it is almost impossible to detect the fluorescence from single molecule (millions of data were really noisy). BUT, you did measure (maybe) the fluorescence anisotropy to detect the rotational motion of a molecule. I never knew it is possible. It is amazing to detect the rotational motion of a molecule in a solid film. Was it possible…I wonder? I NV U (Oh, I previewed what I just have written, and it seems sarcastic, but I really did not intend it, sorry if I hurt you readers…)