ATTENTION : jour et heure inhabituels / unusual day and hour

During the past years, because of fast advances experienced by nanotechnologies, it has become possible to use single molecule experiments in order to manipulate, influence and follow the tasks performed by individual biomolecules. A clue to understand the relevance of these new phenomena in non-equilibrium physics lies on the smallness of the energies involved which are only few times kBT. In this regime, thermal fluctuations and large deviations from the average behavior are important, paving the way to understand the thermodynamic behavior of small systems in non-equilibrium conditions. Optical tweezers are currently recognized as one of the best tools to explore the range of forces (1-100pN) relevant for most biomolecular processes. Single molecule force measurements using optical tweezers can be used to determine the force and mechanical work done upon/by biomolecules.
In this talk I will review some of the results obtained over the past years that illustrate the high potential of these new experimental tools for physics and biology. I will also discuss how these techniques allow us to test fluctuation theorems in statistical physics and how these results can be successfully applied to recover free energies of RNA motifs, beyond what traditional biochemistry methods can provide.

Universitat de Barcelona