Introduction to Experimental Biophysics

Jay L. Nadeau is an associate professor of physics at Portland State University. She was previously a research professor of medical engineering at Caltech (2015-2017) and associate professor of biomedical engineering and physics at McGill University (2004-2015). Her research interests include nanoparticles, fluorescence imaging, and development of instrumentation for the detection of life elsewhere in the solar system. She has published over 70 papers on topics ranging from theoretical condensed matter physics to experimental neurobiology to the development of anticancer drugs and, in the process, has used almost every technique described in this book. Her work has been featured in New Scientist, Highlights in Chemical Biology, Radio Canada’s Les Années Lumière, Le Guide des Tendances, and in educational displays in schools and museums. Her research group features chemists, microbiologists, roboticists, physicists, and physician-scientists, all learning from each other and hoping to speak each other’s language. A believer in bringing biology to physicists as well as physics to biologists, she has created two graduate-level courses: methods in molecular biology for physical scientists and mathematical cellular physiology. She has also taught pharmacology in the medical school and was one of the pioneers in the establishment of multiple mini-interviews for medical school admission. She retains an adjunct position at McGill, and has collaborators in industry and academia in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Japan. She has given several dozen invited talks at meetings of the American Chemical Society, American Geophysical Union, the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), the Committee on Space Research, the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), and many others. Before McGill, she was a member of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Life Detection, and previous to that a Burroughs-Wellcome postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Henry A. Lester at Caltech. She received her PhD in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1996.

Series Preface

Preface

Acknowledgments

Author

Contributors

Chapter 1 Introduction and Background

Chapter 2 Basic Molecular Cloning of DNA and RNA

Chapter 3 Expression of Genes in Bacteria, Yeast, and Cultured Mammalian Cells

Chapter 4 Advanced Topics in Molecular Biology

Chapter 5 Protein Expression Methods

Joshua A. Maurer

Chapter 6 Protein Crystallization

Oliver M. Baettig and Albert M. Berghuis

Chapter 7 Introduction to Biological Light Microscopy

Coauthored with Michael W. Davidson

Chapter 8 Advanced Light Microscopy Techniques

Coauthored with Lina Carlini

Chapter 9 Advanced Topics in Microscopy II: Holographic Microscopy

Coauthored with Manuel Bedrossian

Chapter 10 Quantitative Cell Culture Techniques

Chapter 11 Semiconductor Nanoparticles (Quantum Dots)

Chapter 12 Gold Nanoparticles

Edward S. Allgeyer, Gary Craig, Sanjeev Kumar Kandpal, Jeremy Grant, and Michael D. Mason

Chapter 13 Advanced Topics in Gold Nanoparticles: Biomedical Applications

Chapter 14 Surface Functionalization Techniques

Chapter 15 Electrophysiology

Coauthored with Christian A. Lindensmith and Thomas Knöpfel

Chapter 16 Spectroscopy Tools and Techniques

Chapter 17 Introduction to Nanofabrication

Orad Reshef

Glossary

Appendix A: Common Solutions

Appendix B: Common Media

Appendix C: Restriction Endonucleases

Appendix D: Common Enzymes

Appendix E: Fluorescent Dyes and Quenchers

Appendix F: Fluorescent Proteins

Index