THEORETICAL STUDIES OF DYNAMICAL PROCESSES IN CHEMICAL PHYSICS AND BIOPHYSICS

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Several different topics were studied. (1) A general survey was made of experiments and theory of bacterial chemotaxis. The main interest was to see if one could establish a connection between the essentially biophysical measurements of Berg and others, and the essentially biochemical investigations of Koshland and others. This work continues. (2) When an unsymmetrical molecule (e.g. a protein) moves in a viscous liquid, there is a coupling of viscous forces and torques due to its translation and rotation. When this coupling occurs, it can seriously affect the interpretation of measured translational and rotational diffusion coefficients in terms of molecular size and shape. The theory of this hydrodynamic coupling due to Wegener was verified and then worked out explicitly for a deformed sphere. (3) Two kinds of motion can occur in polymers; one is a local motion involving, e.g., conformational changes, and the other is a global or librational motion involving the entire polymer. Moro pointed out that there can be interactions between these two kinds of motion. This requires a re-working of some of the theory of polymer solution dynamics.