Dan Dickinson Paper Selected as Top 5 of the Year

A paper from the lab of Daniel Dickinson was picked as one of the five top papers of the year in Biophysical Journal. Editors invited Dickinson to present the work at the "Best of BJ" symposium in February, which takes place during the Biophysical Society's annual meeting in San Diego.

"Rapid extraction and kinetic analysis of protein complexes from single cells" appeared in the November 16, 2021 edition of the journal and describes an advance upon the lab's 2017 method for single-cell biochemistry. The earlier method provided a powerful approach for measuring protein-protein interactions in vivo, but as Dickinson and his team noted, "An important limitation was that the time from (manual) cell lysis to data collection was 3-5 minutes – too slow for protein complexes that have weaker affinity." In the 2021 paper, the team found, "we could use a pulsed infrared laser to lyse cells and then begin collecting data immediately, allowing us to measure the kinetics of protein complex dissociation. Laser lysis also improves reproducibility and allows us to document the stage at which each cell or embryo is lysed."

The paper was cowritten with Sena Sarıkaya, a recent undergraduate graduate, who conducted research in the Dickinson lab and in the lab of John Wallingford.