Conveners
M1-6 Biophysics, microscopy and diseases (DPMB) / Biophysique, microscopie et maladies (DPMB): (DPMB) I (DPMB)
- Dr. Laurent Kreplak (Dalhousie University)
Sic1 is a disordered kinase inhibitor, which must be phosphorylated on at least six sites to allow its recognition by the WD40 binding domain of the Cdc4 protein in the yeast cell cycle. The highly-cooperative, switch-like dependence on the number of phosphorylated sites on Sic1 cannot be accounted for by traditional thermodynamic models of cooperativity. We used single-molecule fluorescence...
The retina, with its neural tissue, also acts as a window on the brain. Alzheimer’s disease is currently only definitively diagnosed after death from an analysis of deposits of amyloid beta (plaques) in the brain. Retinal function has been reported to be directly affected by the disease and neurotoxic effects of amyloid beta have been demonstrated in the retina. We were one of the first groups...
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by dementia and memory loss for which no cure or prevention is available. Amyloid toxicity is a result of the non-specific interaction of toxic amyloid oligomers with the plasma membrane.
We studied amyloid aggregation and interaction of amyloid beta (1-42) peptide with lipid membrane using atomic force microscopy (AFM),...
Counting photobleach steps lets us infer the number of oligomeric subunits of fluorescently-labelled protein complexes. While ad hoc step-counting algorithms are adequate for low noise imaging with small numbers of steps, noise increases with the number of fluorophores and introduces bias when the intensity trace is filtered to reduce noise. We present a principled Bayesian approach with a...
