Enzymology and life at the single molecule level

Abstract

The advent of room-temperature single-molecule imaging and spectroscopy in the early 1990s made it possible to follow biochemical reactions and conformational dynamics of an individual enzyme molecule in real time, yielding new information about the working of enzymes in vitro. This eventually led to the recent success of probing single-molecule biochemical reactions in a living cell with high specificity, millisecond time resolution, and nanometer spatial precision. We have studied how gene expression and regulation occur at the single- molecule level in living bacterial cells. The examples herein illustrate the impact of the single-molecule approach on biological discovery, as well as prospects for medicine.