A bending rigidity parameter for stress granule condensates
J. Law, C. Jones, T. Stevenson, T. Williamson, M. Turner, H. Kusumaatmaja, S. Grellscheid
Image Credit: Thomas Stevenson
Research
I am a member of Halim Kusumaatmaja's group at Durham University and am interested in soft-matter and biophysics, and in particular condensates.
Biomolecular condensates are liquid-like droplets which form in cells through liquid-liquid phase separation and are thought to act as sites for chemical sequastration and as reaction vessels.
My work is on a flicker spectrocopy techinque which we have developed to measure the mechanical properties of condensates (like their surface tension and bending rigidity) by observing their thermal fluctuations in microscope images.
Since the composition of a condensate affects its properties, we can use this information to understand the structure of conensates as well as how they form and how they age.
Publications
Other Work
For the past two years, I have undertaken a Laidlaw Scholarship which, amongst other things, allowed me to conduct work as a summer student in 2022 on the same project I now work on as a PhD student and work as an Assistant Instructor on a STEM outreach programme in Boston, USA.
I was also featured in the Laidlaw Scholars' Organisation's Scholar Spotlight.
You can read my reports from both of these summer projects by clicking the button below.