Chemical Engineering Seminar

A fundamental challenge of modern physical science is to form structure that is not frozen in place but instead reconfigures internally driven by energy throughput and adapts to its environment robustly. With catalytic enzymes, we find problems of mechanobiology. With chemical reactions, we find problems of active matter. Exploring the potential of liquid-phase TEM to image individual molecules and their mutual interactions, we analyze failed and successful encounters of polymers and proteins, and visualize enzyme conformational changes in real time. A picture emerges in which simple experiments, performed at single-particle and single-molecule resolution, can dissect macroscopic phenomena in ways that surprise.