Title: Nucleic acid probes that sense and respond to piconewton force enable new insights and applications in mechanobiology
Abstract: Cells are highly dynamic structures that are constantly converting chemical energy into mechanical work to pull and push on one another and on their surroundings. These pulls and pushes are mediated by tiny molecular forces at the scale of piconewtons. For context, 7 pN applied a distance of 1 nm is ~1 kcal/mol. Nonetheless, these forces can have profound biochemical consequences. For example, the rapidly fluctuating forces between immune cells and their targets can drastically tune immune response and function. Despite the importance of such forces, there are limited methods to study forces at the molecular scale and particularly at the junction of living cells. In this talk, I will discuss my group’s efforts at developing DNA mechanotechnology tools (1) to study the molecular dynamics of forces (2), the source of molecular forces at fluid membranes (3) and the development of new drug delivery strategies that employ forces (4). I will spend some time discussing force-triggered switches to detect molecular crowding at interfaces (5) and testing different models of mechanotransduction (6) in immunology. I’ll end my talk describing the advent of new CRISPR catalytic amplification strategies for medical diagnostics which includes published (7) and unpublished work.