Recent Literature

Some recent entries of interest in the single molecule literature:

• A former colleague of mine, Anne Gershenson, now a professor at Brandeis, has written a review of single molecule enzymology for Current Opinion in Chemical Biology. It holds up as an example the work on HIV-RT done by Elio Abbondanzieri, formerly of the Block lab, now at the Zhuang lab. But it's a good examination of the state-of-the-state-of-the-art.
• The Bustamante lab has published new work on optical trapping of frameshifting psuedoknots in PNAS. People have been working for some time to understand what exactly is the origin of psuedoknot frameshifting efficiency, with mixed results, but figure five is where the money is here, strongly suggesting a relationship between unfolding force and frameshifting efficiency. I haven't read the whole thing, though, so I will reserve further comment.
• Helicos has a paper in Nature Methods reporting on a "virtual terminator nucleotide" for sequencing. These appear to be nucleotides that can reversibly terminate elongation, like a di-deoxy nucleotide that can be un-di-deoxied, if you will. This ensures that the next base added in a single-molecule addition assay is really only a single base, but that further bases can still be added afterwards, elegantly fixing accumulated off-by-one errors.
• Also, Hagar Zohar from the Muller lab at Berkeley writes in with news of their new web page of links to resources for single molecule biophysics, put together by a grad student organization called the CharISMA Idea Lab. I added a link on the right as well.