Faculty Seminar: "STEPS IN BIOLOGY" by Erdal Toprak
STEPS IN
BIOLOGY
Speaker: Erdal Toprak, Harvard Medical School
Speaker: Erdal Toprak, Harvard Medical School
Abstract: Many biological events happen in a stepwise fashion, where the 'steps' are: 1) Either actual physical discrete movements in Cartesian coordinates (e.g. conformational changes in the three-dimensional structures of biological molecules) or 2) discrete jumps on a chemical lattice (e.g. mutations in single DNA bases). Such steps are generally intractable via conventional technologies, and novel tools are necessary to unveil their detail. In the first part of my talk, I will elaborate on a particular example of the first kind of such stepwise biological events: The stepping dynamics of cytoskeleton motor proteins which are involved in processes such as intracellular cargo transport or muscle contraction for which I developed single molecule tools in Paul Selvin’s Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the second part of my talk, I will focus on stepwise increase of bacterial drug resistance due to cumulative random mutations which are fixed under particular selection pressures. Along these lines, I will introduce the evolution of bacterial drug resistance, and a novel tool I developed during my post-doctoral studies to be able to decipher antibiotic resistance in clinically relevant settings.
Academic Background: I studied physics as an undergrad and master’s student at Bogazici University. After finishing the master’s program, I started a PhD program in computational biology and biophysics in 2003 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I spent 4 years to earn my doctorate, studying the properties of motor proteins by using single molecule microscopy. I started working at Harvard Medical School in 2008 as a post doctoral research fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Roy Kishony where I am currently studying bacterial drug resistance.
30 June Wednesday 2010, at 11.00 FASS 1103