About the event

The Women in Physics Student Club has the honour to host Prof. María García-Parajo in the third WiP Seminars event.

In the WiP Seminars you have the chance to not only learn about research carried out by internationally renowned physicists, but also participate in an informal conversation with them and ask about their career. Be sure to register!

María García-Parajo is an ICREA Research Professor and leader of the Single Molecule Biophotonics group at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona. Her work combines physics, photonics and biology.

About the speaker

María García-Parajo is an ICREA Research Professor at ICFO, leading the Single Molecule Biophotonics group. Her research interests lie at the interface between Physics, Photonics and Biology. To date she has published more than 180 papers. She coordinates several international research projects, and is a member of various international scientific advisory, executive and editorial boards. She has received several prestigious awards, including the Bruker Prize of the Spanish Biophysics Society (2017), ERC Advanced grant (2017) and Emmy Noether Distinction from the European Physical Society (2020). María is actively involved in (inter)national actions to promote gender equity in Science.

Abstract of the seminar

Organization by compartmentalization is a general property of natural systems that efficiently facilitates and orchestrates biological events in space and time. In the last decade, compartmentalization of the plasma membrane of living cells has emerged as a dominant feature present at different spatiotemporal scales and regulating key cell functions¹. In parallel, recent experimental evidence points to the notion that the nucleus of living cells is highly compartmentalized. The advent of super-resolution microscopy and single molecule dynamic approaches has allowed the study of living cell membranes and intact nuclei with unprecedented levels of details^2,3. In particular, single particle tracking (SPT) approaches have revealed that most cell membrane receptors and/or molecules inside the cell nucleus exhibit anomalous diffusion and weak ergodicity breaking⁴. The manifestation of such behavior is directly linked to molecular function and result from the nano- and meso-scale interaction of molecules with their surrounding environment^4,5. In this talk, I will discuss evidence for anomalous diffusion on prototypical membrane receptors and in the cell nucleus and will show a direct correlation between these phenomena and biological function. Moreover, I will describe the combination of SPT at different labelling densities. Low density conditions allow us to reconstruct the mobility of individual molecules and their transient interaction with other molecular partners, while high density labeling conditions provide complementary information on the spatial and temporal length scales of cellular regions re-visited (or forbidden) for molecules. We find that both molecular diffusion and dynamic re-modelling of the environment play key roles regulating biological function.