Single-Molecule Methods in Polymer Science

Abstract

The single-molecule fluorescence methods offer several advantages to the biophysics researchers. One of the advantages is that the fluorescence measurements can be performed in situ, though it remains true that the spatial resolution of electron microscopy is better. The use of a single-molecule tracking to follow the Gaussian center of a blurry diffraction-limited image, it may be a few nanometers to a few tens of nanometers. Conformational mobility and transport can also be studied. Tracking the transport of individual polymer molecules finds wider application when the moving molecules become larger, large enough that the molecule exceeds the spatial resolution. The technique of fluorescence correlation spectroscopy averages over the course of time over many molecules, each of them measured with single-molecule sensitivity for a short time, allowing single-polymer diffusion to be measured at surfaces and in ultra-dilute solutions.