In addition to its annual lectures, ChBE hosts a weekly seminar throughout the year with invited lecturers who are prominent in their fields. Unless otherwise noted, all seminars are held on Wednesdays in the Molecular Science and Engineering Building ("M" Building) in G011 (Cherry Logan Emerson Lecture Theater) at 4:00 p.m. Refreshments are served at 3:30 p.m. in the Emerson-Lewis Reception Salon.

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Mapping photoautotrophic carbon metabolism with 13C flux analysis

Interactions between molecules and surfaces lead to complex and highly-varied interfacial behavior, where heterogeneity may arise from spatial variation of the surface/interface itself or from molecular configurations (i.e. conformation, orientation, aggregation state, etc.). These phenomena greatly impact technologies and applications including biomaterials, separations (chromatography and membrane filtration), heterogeneous catalysis, and biosensing, among others. The direct observation of adsorption, interfacial diffusion, and desorption of individual fluorescent molecules permits the characterization of heterogeneous interfacial behavior in ways that are inaccessible to traditional ensemble-averaged methods. Moreover, spectral information can be used to simultaneously track molecular configuration (aggregation or folding state). Single-molecule tracking experiments have traditionally been limited by small sample sizes (e.g. a few hundred molecules), leading to poor statistical significance and a lack of sensitivity to rare populations.  However, new advances in high-throughput tracking methods now enable hundreds of thousands of molecules to be followed in a given experiment. This approach has recently been used to characterize heterogeneous molecule-surface interactions including: multiple modes of diffusion and desorption associated with both internal and external molecular configuration, intermittent interfacial transport, spatially dependent interactions, and others.