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Hello, my name is Bo Huang, and I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical
Chemistry at UCSF.
I came from China; I got my bachelor's degree of chemistry from Peking University in China,
then I went down to get a Ph.D. in chemistry at Stanford University. Before I joined UCSF
faculty, I did my post-doc at Harvard University.
So the research in my lab is to find ways that we directly observe how the molecule
functions in the cell, especially in the living cell. We do this mostly through using dye
as a tool, and in particular a number of groups, including us, has developed a method called
"Super-Resolution Microscopy." What it does is allow a microscope to see a thing almost
the size of a protein molecule. This has been deemed as impossible because it's seemingly
against the physical principles, because the wavelength of light is about two orders the
magnitude larger than the size of a protein molecule.
Super resolution microscopy circumvented this limit, and the method that we are particularly
using is called "Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy," or STORM, utilize some specific
photo-physical properties of molecules that can emit light. In this way we can find out
the exact position of every molecule one-by-one, and using those positions we can figure out
the structure.
So why do we care about this higher resolution? Well, it's exactly because cells are not just
the back of enzymes, it's really a precisely organized machine - for example, they are
many molecular complexes, and many protein or nucleic acid molecules come together to
perform a coordinated function, such as those involved in DNA duplication in protein synthesis.
The signaling in the cell is also specially regulated. There are small compartments, small
domains, to confine all these signals from spreading out to everywhere inside the cell.
Those structures are often too small to study by conventional light microscopy, and they're
too big to study by existing structure biology methods. And this molecule-to-cell nanoscale
gap is exactly what we want to bridge. By doing this we will be able to get really deep
understandings of how a cell functions, all the way from cell level down to the molecular
level. In the same way, we will be able to figure out the mechanisms of how disease develop,
as well as how we can cure it.