Pollard Lecture Set for 12 April
23 March 2004 — Carlos Bustamante, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, will present the 2004 Ernest C. Pollard Lecture at 4:00 p.m. on Monday, 12 April, in 101 Althouse Laboratory on the Penn State University Park campus. The free public lecture, titled “Grabbing the Cat by the Tail: Studies of DNA Packaging by Single f29 Bacteriophage Particles Using Optical Tweezers,” will address fundamental principles employed by this virus to package its genome during phage assembly to make mature, infectious particles. The lecture will illustrate powerful new technologies that permit studies of single molecules to reveal previously inaccessible biological secrets. A brief discussion of Bustamante’s work can be found on the web at http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Research-Review/Highlights/2002/stories/biosciences/mighty.html, or at his lab’s home page: http://alice.berkeley.edu/.
Bustamante received his bachelor's degree from Cayetano Heredia University in Peru; his master's degree in biochemistry from San Marcos University in Peru; and his Ph.D. degree in biophysics from UC Berkeley, where he studied with Ignacio Tinoco, Jr. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Bustamante studied with Marc Maestre. He was a member of the chemistry department at the University of New Mexico in 1982. Before moving to Berkeley, he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a professor at the University of Oregon. He also leads a collaborative research team in the Physical Biosciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has launched an initiative called Microscopies of Molecular Machines (M3) to use conventional and newly developed microscopy techniques to create a tool kit for probing the inner workings of molecular machines. This program is described on the web at http://www.lbl.gov/pbd/science/MolMachines.html.
The lecture is named in honor of Ernest C. Pollard, the professor of physics who taught at Penn State from 1961 to 1971 and founded the Department of Biophysics. In 1979, the Department of Biophysics merged with the Department of Microbiology and Biochemistry to form the present Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
[ B. Tracy Nixon / B K K ]
