The Unbearable Lightness of Being: An Introduction to The Role of Softness in Biological Molecules
Robert Austin
Department of Physics, Princeton University; Visiting Member of HKUST Institute for Advanced Study

Schrödinger speculated in his epochal 1944 monograph “What is Life?” that biological molecules, and the genetic material in particular, must be some sort of “a-periodic crystal”. We have come a long way since then thanks to the tools of physics, but the idea of “crystals” still holds sway when talking about protein and DNA structure. In fact, biological molecules are conformationally flexible: they are soft. This softness is extremely important in understanding how biological molecules function. I will discuss the role that softness plays in the “being” of biology using work from our lab over the years.

Bio (by Robert Austin):
Prof Austin received his PhD degree in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1976, under the supervision of Prof Hans Frauenfelder. His PhD thesis was about the experimental temperature-dependent dynamics of proteins and was the first presentation of the free energy landscapes of proteins. After his graduation, he spent 3 years as Max Planck Stipendiat at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany (West Germany at the time). Then he returned to the US and took an assistant professorship at Princeton University and has stayed therein ever since. He is currently Professor of Physics at Princeton. Prof Austin's research interests are in experimental biological physics over a wide range of areas: Fundamentals of Protein Dynamics: Energy Landscapes and Quantum Mechanics of Proteins, DNA Dynamics: sequence influences, Nanotechnology: DNA Dynamics, Nanotechnology: Micro/nanofluidics and recently Ecology and Evolution Dynamics. He has been an Editor for Physical Review Letters, has served twice as a Councilor for the American Physical Society, has been Chair of the Division of Biological Physics, American Physical Society and the US Liaison Committee for the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association of Arts and Sciences, and won the Lilienfeld Prize, American Physical Society. He can’t run.

Confining DNA in a Tight Space – DNA Analysis in Nanochannels
Chi-Kuan Tung
Department of Physics, The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

The elongation of genomic length DNA in confining nanochannels is not only a fascinating exercise in polymer dynamics, but also is of great interest in biotechnology because the elongation of the confined molecule is directly proportional to the actual length of the molecule in basepairs. I will briefly review the physics of the spatially confined long chain molecule, and how that can be used to yield useful genomic information. I will also discuss our ambition to perform electrical detection in a nanochannel.

Giant Electrorheological Effect: From Macroscopic Model to Microscopic Mechanism
Shuyu Chen
Department of Physics, The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Electrorheological (ER) fluids are a type of “smart“ colloidal system capable of varying viscosity or even solidification under an applied electric field. They exhibit marvellous features such as reversable rheological variation and short-time response. The recent discovery of the giant electrorheological (GER) effect has renewed the interest in the potential applications of the ER fluid. In this talk, I will briefly introduce how the GER effect is described by the so-called Saturation Polarization Model. Then I will move to the discussion of the enhanced alignment of molecular dipoles in a nanoscale confinement. This can serve as the microscopic mechanism of GER effect.