Abstract
Advances in our understanding of optics have had great impact on the study of biological systems. Beginning with the Dutch draper-turned-optician Antonie van Leeuwenhoek whose microscopes made visible the cellular structure of organisms in the late 1600s, the geometrical optics that we have discussed played a fundamental rôle in the developing field of biology. The wavelength limitations of visible light can be overcome with electron microscope, providing considerably more resolving power.Further advances in cryo-electron microscopy have now brought the resolution down to the nanometer scale and beyond, in fortuitous cases. This is verging on the scale of atomic resolution within molecules that are composed of millions of atoms.
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Notes
- 1.
As mentioned previously, the German physicist Ernst Ruska was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 “for his fundamental work in electron optics, and for the design of the first electron microscope.” Ruska shared the award with Binnig and Rohrer for their development of STM.
- 2.
Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013 “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.”
- 3.
Scripts for all exercises are provided as supplemental material.
- 4.
Ewald published “Die Berechnung optischer und elektrostatischer Gitterpotentiale” in the Annalen der Physik in 1921.
- 5.
Fischer published “Einfluss der Configuration auf die Wirkung der Enzyme” in the European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry. Fischer was awarded the 1902 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by his work on sugar and purine syntheses.”
- 6.
Crowfoot and colleagues published “X-ray crystallographic investigation of the structure of penicillin” as a chapter in Chemistry of Penicillin, Princeton University Press in 1949. Crowfoot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 “for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances.”
- 7.
Perutz and Kendrew were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962 “for their studies of the structures of globular proteins.”
- 8.
Hauptman and Karle were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985 “for their outstanding achievements in the development of direct methods for the determination of crystal structures.”
- 9.
Mobashery and his students published “Crystal structure of 6α-hydroxymethylpenicillanate complexed to the TEM-1 β-lactamase from Escherichia coli: Evidence on the mechanism of action of a novel inhibitor designed by a computer-aided process” in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1996.
- 10.
Koshland published “Application of a theory of enzyme specificity to protein synthesis” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.
- 11.
The German chemist Leonor Michaelis and Canadian physician Maud Menten published a mathematical treatment of enzyme kinetics in “Die Kinetik der Invertinwirkung” in the Biochemische Zeitung in 1913.
- 12.
Francis Crick and coworkers published “General nature of the genetic code for proteins” in Nature in 1961. Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.”
- 13.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 was awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.”
- 14.
Pauling’s remarks on “The probability of errors in the process of synthesis of protein molecules” were published in the Festschrift Arthur Stoll, Birkhäuser Verlag, 1958.
- 15.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1997 was awarded to Paul Boyer and John Walker “for their elucidation of the enzymatic mechanism underlying the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP).” The award was shared with Jens Skou “for the first discovery of an ion-transporting enzyme, Na+, K+ -ATPase.”
- 16.
Yasuda and coworkers published “F 1-ATPase is a highly efficient molecular motor that rotates with discrete 120∘ steps” in Cell.
- 17.
Ashkin published “Acceleration and trapping of particles by radiation pressure” in the Physical Review Letters in 1970 and realized his ideas with help from Steven Chu, among others, in “Observation of a single-beam gradient force optical trap for dielectric particles” published in Optics Letters in 1986.
- 18.
Kenneth Downing and Nogales published “Cryoelectron microscopy applications in the study of tubulin structure, microtubule architecture, dynamics and assemblies, and interaction of microtubules with motors” in Methods in Enzymology in 2010.
- 19.
Brown and colleagues published “Direct observation of kinesin stepping by optical trapping interferometry” in Nature in 1993.
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© 2018 Mark A. Cunningham
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Cunningham, M.A. (2018). Biological Systems. In: Beyond Classical Physics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63160-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63160-8_10
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