Faculty Seminar: "STEPS IN BIOLOGY" by Erdal Toprak

STEPS IN
BIOLOGY



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