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Updated: Sep 27, 2026

Microfluidic Mixers for Studying Protein Folding
Published on: April 10, 2012
Single-molecule folding
Xiaowei Zhuang1, Matthias Rief
1Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. zhuang@chemistry.harvard.edu
Abstract:
Recent developments in fluorescence and force spectroscopy enable us to go beyond the ensemble average and measure the behavior of individual biomacromolecules. These single-molecule approaches can directly resolve transient intermediate states and multiple reaction pathways, and thus are uniquely powerful in characterizing the complex dynamics of biological processes. Recent applications of these two techniques to the protein and RNA folding problems have led to exciting new results.
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