Jack Tait
Optical Tweezers for Studying The Dynamics of Disome Co-Translation: During protein synthesis in the cell, it is possible for ribosomes to 'pair up' and work together to assemble multimeric proteins directly. This so-called 'co-co' assembly mechanism is ubiquitous in humans; but the mechanism which allows these ribosomes to choose to 'pair up' is entirely unknown. I use optical tweezers to track the movements of ribosomes in vitro, to elucidate the mechanicsms underlying the formation of ribosome pairs and their co-ordinated translation of mRNA messages.