GENERAL IDEA

Here we take stock of the remarkable developments and innovations in biophysics that have allowed us to address very challenging and fundamental questions about the key cellular processes, and speculate where this might lead in the near future.

Introduction

The emergence of single-molecule cellular biophysics represents a coming-of-age of single-molecule bioscience. The first generation of single-molecule experiments resulted in some exceptionally pioneering developments in terms of the physics of techniques and novel analytical methods and in terms of significantly increasing our understanding of the functioning of isolated biological molecules. But now, as we have seen from myriad investigations discussed in this book, the next generation of single-molecule bioscience has opened up outstanding opportunities to study biological processes under physiologically highly appropriate conditions – in other words to gain enormous insight into how single molecules really function in the context of their native environment of the living cell. In this final chapter we survey the developments that have led us to this point, and ask the question ‘what next?’ As we will see, there is great potential to apply these novel technologies in areas that may have a large future impact on society, namely those of bionanotechnology and synthetic biology, fuel production for commerical use and single-molecule biomedicine.