Speaker
Description
Optical tweezers use highly focused light beams to manipulate microscopic objects and measure forces at the single-molecule level, enabling precise investigation of biomolecular structure and dynamics [1]. By applying controlled mechanical stimuli, this technique reveals elastic, kinetic, and energetic properties of DNA, RNA, and proteins as they undergo biochemical reactions. In this talk, we present the principles of optical trapping and its application to studying the interaction between human Thymidylate Synthase (hTS)—a key enzyme for cell survival and a major anticancer drug target—and its mRNA [2,3]. The results shed light on the molecular mechanisms of translational repression and offer insights useful to overcoming chemoresistance.
[1] C. Bustamante et al., Optical tweezers in single-molecule biophysics. Nat. Rev. Methods Primers 1, 25 (2021).
[2] N.D. Brunn et al., Analysis of mRNA recognition by human thymidylate synthase, Bioscience Reports, 34(6), 2014.
[3] D. Cardinale et al., Protein–protein interfacebinding peptides inhibit the cancer therapy target human thymidylate synthase, PNAS, 108(34), 2011.
Annamaria Zaltron is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Padova. She earned her PhD in Physics working on optically active materials for the development of light-driven devices capable of manipulating and sensing microscopic objects. Since 2018, her research has focused on biophysics, particularly on single-molecule force spectroscopy using optical tweezers. Her work explores allosteric mechanisms in DNA-based biosensors, protein folding, and RNA-binding enzymes, with the aim of unraveling their molecular free energy landscapes. She also carried out postdoctoral research at Université de Lorraine (France), the University of Münster (Germany), and the University of Barcelona (Spain). She is the co-author of more than 60
peer-reviewed articles in international scientific journals.
