We look at “Life”, molecule by molecule. Single molecule approaches to biology and biophysics reveal unforeseen details about the building blocks of biology. From these, we can understand the role of fluctuations and the interplay of biomolecules, to open new insights into their functioning. As much as these insights provide answers to scientific questions, they can provide novel strategies toward biomedical problems.

We develop and combine cutting-edge single molecule and single cell techniques to solve important problems in biological science, including the organization and dynamics of chromosomes, biomolecular recognition/assembly, and molecular machinery working on nucleic acids. Our study requires cross-disciplinary efforts from biologists, physicists, chemists, and engineering scientists and thus we pursue collaborations with groups from diverse scientific disciplines.