TITLE: Machines that Replicate Genetic Information

SPEAKER: Professor David Keller,

TIME: Thursday Aug. 31, 2006 at 4:00 PM

PLACE: George P. Williams, Jr. Lecture Hall, (Olin 101)

Much of what goes on inside living things is carried out and controlled by nanometer-scale machines and motors. They pull, spin, switch, cut, paste, control, and record information, to name just a few key "mechanical" functions. All use some form of chemical "fuel" to generate forces and motions in the course of carrying out their tasks. DNA Polymerases are the molecular machines that replicate and repair all genetic information. By a complex mechanism involving several moving parts and structures, a DNA polymerase binds to DNA and crawls along it, using one copy of DNA as a template to create a second copy. Recent crystal structures, ensemble kinetics, single-molecule investigations, and mutagenesis/sequence comparison have helped to elucidate the main working parts and properties of several DNA polymerases, all of which share common structural elements and (apparently) a common basic mechanism, despite (very) wide variations in amino acid sequence. The talk will summarize what is known about DNA polymerase structure and function, our recent single-molecule force and stochastic kinetics experiments, the general mechanisms by which such machines convert "explosive" bond breaking and forming events to mechanical motion ("mechanochemistry"), and our current understanding of how the DNA polymerase machine works.

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