No.48 Seminar ： From the origin of life to cell manipulation: Temperature gradients at a small scale
- Yusuke Maeda (The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research)
- 2012/10/16 4:00pm
- The Hakubi Center for advanced research (iCeMS West Wing 2F, Seminar Room)
- Japanese
Summary
Temperature differences at large scales, kilometers or more, are present in our planet and essential for plate tectonics and meteorological phenomena. As the earth is blessed with temperature, it has revolutionized our life: Carnot showed the operation of the heat engine in two temperature systems at the industrial revolution, which led to the second law of thermodynamics.
On a smaller scale, millimeters or less, temperature differences are also present in the pores of hydrothermal vents. The motion of molecules under such temperature gradients, called thermophoresis or the Soret effect, where thermal convection is suppressed could be relevant to the inhomogeneous distribution of chemical species. To understand the Soret effect at a small scale, we studied the motion of DNA and RNA in a temperature gradient built by infrared laser focusing. In this seminar I will present our experimental result that temperature gradients in a polymer solution can select and accumulate DNA and RNA. A consequence of this effect concerns the origin of life: temperature gradients may select small RNA enzymes from a pool of random sequences. At the end of the talk, cell manipulation as a potential application for this effect will be discussed.