Conférence du Dr. Jean Duhamel (Waterloo)

Titre : Probing the Internal Dynamics of Macromolecules in Solution Quantitatively by Using Time-Resolved Fluorescence.

Cette conférence sera prononcée (en anglais) par le Dr. Jean Duhamel du Waterloo Institute of Nanotechnology affilié à l'University of Waterloo. Ce dernier sera à Montréal à titre d'examinateur externe d'une soutenance de thèse en chimie.

Résumé : The internal dynamics of macromolecules are involved in a wide array of physical phenomena that include the folding of a randomly coiled polypeptide in a 3-dimensional structured active enzyme, the deformation of an associative thickener under shear resulting in a massive drop in the viscosity of the polymer solution, or the shuttling of the chain ends of a dendrimer decorated with a valuable cargo from the congested interior of the dendrimer to its interface with the solvent. We have introduced the Fluorescence Blob Model (FBM) and Model Free Analysis (MFA) which together enable the quantitative analysis of the internal dynamics of an incredibly wide variety of fluorescently labelled macromolecules. This talk will illustrate this point with examples where the FBM was applied to describe the internal dynamics of pyrene-labelled polymers and the distribution of metal cations along DNA, and where the MFA was employed to describe the internal dynamics of pyrene-labelled dendrimers and the kinetics of Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) from the dendrimer ends to its core.

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