Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2010
Volume 55, Number 2
Monday–Friday, March 15–19, 2010; Portland, Oregon
Session L7: Educational Challenges in Biological Physics |
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Sponsoring Units: DBP FEd Chair: Aihua Xie, Oklahoma State University Room: Portland Ballroom 254 |
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 2:30PM - 3:06PM |
L7.00001: Education at the Interface -- Experiences and Perspectives Invited Speaker: UCSD has been one of the pioneering institutions in establishing training at the interface of the physical and life sciences. In the early nineties we created the La Jolla Interface in Sciences program when the idea of dual mentorship was first established. It has been a great success and dual training is now adopted by many institutions in the America and worldwide. This experience has helped us to establish the first NSF Physics Frontier Center in Biological Physics. I will discuss the training of physicists that are able to have an impact in both the life sciences and in the physics of complex systems. Physics has been having a major impact in the life sciences but the reverse is also true! Biological questions have driven major developments in modern physics. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 3:06PM - 3:42PM |
L7.00002: Keeping the Physics in Biophysics and Vice Versa Invited Speaker: I did my undergraduate studies, majoring in Physics, at a famous university where biophysical topics never entered the undergraduate Physics curriculum at all. And yet, once life science and physical science were regarded as inseparable--as Natural Science. Today we're entering another golden age of two-way exchange between life science, physical science, and even engineering. It's time for our education to reflect that. But we lose something if we just tell our Physics majors to take some Biochemistry courses. Instead we can introduce them to the same sort of probabilistic data analysis, real computer programming (not just black boxes), and falsifiable quantitative hypothesis testing that we want all our other Physics students to use. Even more important, we can introduce students majoring in other sciences to our methods, which are becoming ever more important in other fields. I'll give some examples of what has worked at University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 3:42PM - 4:18PM |
L7.00003: Hands-On Education at the Interface Between Physics and Biology Invited Speaker: Students from across the physical sciences and their partner engineering disciplines are clamoring to learn about the amazing advances being made in the life sciences. Often, they wonder how they might use their quantitative background productively in the study of living matter. In this talk, I will draw from my own experiences in teaching a host of different courses ranging from freshman biology for non-biology majors to graduate courses in biophysics to intense summer courses such as the Physiology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. My central thesis will be that the best way to learn about the biology-physics interface comes from intense, hands-on courses in which students do experiments to get a feeling for the numbers in biology and to develop a clear idea of how to perform measurements and what to do with them once they have made them. Though the talk will attempt to comment on the significance of these experiences for other students, in the end, the student who has been touched the most by this hands-on approach is the speaker himself. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 4:18PM - 4:54PM |
L7.00004: TBA Invited Speaker: |
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 4:54PM - 5:30PM |
L7.00005: Viral DNA Packaging at Base Pair Resolution Invited Speaker: Homomeric ring-ATPases of the ASCE family are responsible for a variety of important cellular functions, ranging from DNA translocation to protein degradation. The bacteriophage phi29, a model system for this family, uses such a ring-ATPase to compress its genome to near-crystalline density within a protein shell. To determine the mechanism of this packaging motor, we used a novel high-resolution optical tweezers to observe the discrete increments of DNA packaged by a single bacteriophage. Analysis of these steps reveals that each subunit waits to utilize ATP until four out of five subunits are loaded. The DNA is then packaged in not one step but in a coordinated burst of four 2.5-base-pair steps. In parallel, we determined how the motor engages the DNA by challenging the motor with a series of short regions of chemically modified DNA. Take together these studies reveal a surprising degree of inter-subunit communication, in which the identical subunits take on different properties based on their context in the ring. Because of its relationship to the ASCE family, the mechanism we determine for the packaging motor of phi29 may have implications for the general mechanism of a diverse set of cellular motors. [Preview Abstract] |
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