Single-Molecule Approach to Molecular Biology in Living Bacterial Cells

From Q-bio

Recent developments on fluorescent proteins and microscopy techniques have allowed the probing of single molecules in a living bacterial cell with millisecond time resolution and nanometer spatial precision. These single-molecule experiments have brought new insights into the mechanisms of many processes in molecular biology, such as DNA-protein interactions, gene regulation, transcription, translation, and replication. I will review the key methods of single-molecule detection and highlight numerous examples to illustrate how these experiments are contributing to the quantitative understanding of the fundamental processes of a living cell.