Profile
Colin Logie is the Project Leader of the Collaborative Research Project ‘Chromatin higher order dynamics: A single molecule approach'
A moment with Colin Logie
In a recent interview, Colin Logie, Chair of the EuroDYNA Scientific Committee talks about organising the EuroDYNA session at ELSO and future challenges for the cell biology field and for EuroDYNA.
Why did you choose the topic ‘Chromatin and the cell cycle’ for the EuroDYNA session at ELSO?
Although we know a lot about the cell, DNA and chromatin, we still lack insight into how it functions. To understand how things function you have to put them into context. One thing about life is that it is cell based and one thing about cells is that they are always the product of cell division of a previous cell. So, to really understand chromosomes we really have to understand how the chromosomes behave in the cell cycle. I think during the session we saw an example of very disparate talks that ended up with conclusions about chromosomes fitting together because they fit the context of the cell cycle as the common denominator.
What, in your opinion, are the challenges in your field?
One of the frontiers of this field is to really see what happens inside living cells. We have done many beautiful experiments in the recent past. By we, I mean the scientific community. What we need is multi-molecular assembly dynamics data , these things are really difficult to see at the moment. We need to be able to see them to find out which factors are playing roles of messengers and which ones are playing more structural roles. Essentially it boils down to physically describing the isomerisations that take place in the cell, the DNA and also in the membranes. We also need to find ways to estimate the energetic code of each transaction and by integrating these types of data over multiple length scales from the nanometer to the micrometer. From this we should be able to formulate a mathematical description of biological systems.
What’s also a big challenge is our ability to monitor things at the right time scale. We know that molecules function on the level of millions as well as thousands of a second and this spans six maybe even seven orders of magnitude. Right now we don’t have good modelling systems to integrate all the data at those different time scales and length scales and I think that’s a major challenge. It’s not so complicated to address this. We need durable funding of scientific research; we need to maintain and sometimes also improve career opportunities, support institutes where innovation and originality are encouraged and promote communication amongst scientists. The latter is very important and something that ESF has been doing very well. We need communication between disciplines but also within disciplines.
What can the scientific community expect from EuroDYNA as a collaboration?
People cannot expect medical applications like cures but they can expect us to describe biological pathways in more detail. This will provide us with much better tools to monitor disease, disease remission and disease progression. Essentially EuroDYNA has made significant contribution to getting hold of molecular markers for certain conditions, one of them is cancer but also ageing.
One field which is moving forward at the moment is nanoscience. By looking in great detail using biophysical methods on single molecules we are actually studying nanomotors which are driven by ATP. The exciting application for this is that maybe one day such motors can be harvested to produce DNA based machines. EuroDYNA’s contribution in this field involves what we are doing in defining the forces that are deployed by these motors. At the moment physical description of biology is lagging behind but we are getting there now by finding forces, distances and time.
The interview with Colin Logie is available in podcast format. Click here to listen.
