A quantitative look at protein diffusion in cells and crowded media

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Living systems are highly dynamic. In particular, most cellular processes involve motions of molecules across or between cellular compartments. Thus understanding how cells work will require understanding how proteins move in the cellular environment. In this context, my research focuses on protein diffusion. My goal is to understand how protein diffusion in the cell interior (a crowded and non-equilibrium environment) might differ from diffusion in simple fluids, and how these differences might impact the many cellular processes involving protein diffusion. To do so, we will take advantage of recent developments in microscopy, which presently allow characterizing diffusion, using fluorescence techniques, over a range of length-scales extending from the size of a cell (~ 10 microns) to the characteristic mesh size of the cell cytoskeleton (~50 nm).