The development of experimental techniques that are capable of following the reaction trajectories of individual biomolecules or molecular complexes has revolutionized the way we understand biology. There exist two major families of single-molecule methods, fluorescence-based detection and force-based manipulation. I will present two systems that have been dissected in detail by these methods, namely genome packaging in bacteriophage phi29 and reverse transcription in human HIV. These studies illustrate some of the design principles which allow enzymes to obtain multiplex functionality and in the meantime their activities to be precisely controlled.

个人简介：

刘诗欣博士于1998年考入中国科学技术大学少年班，2003年毕业于中国科学技术大学生命科学学院，同年赴美国哈佛大学化学与化学生物系攻读博士学位，师从庄小威教授。2009年获博士学位，现在UC Berkeley和Howard Hughes Medical Institute从事博士后研究工作。他在利用单分子探测与操控技术研究复杂生物过程的分子机理方面取得了突出的研究成果，以第一作者身份在Science, Cell, Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, PNAS上发表论文多篇。曾获08年国家优秀留学生奖。