Biology: May the Force be with you

The atomic force microscope is one of the great scientific inventions of the late 20th century, allowing scientists to “see” and “feel” a panoply of ordinarily-imperceptible entities with sub-nanometre resolution. At the heart of an AFM is a well-known 17th-century law that’s still going strong – Hooke’s law. Here we’ll journey from the nanoscale to the cellular level, to find out how you can do science by treating physical and biological objects as individual, or collections of, springs. We will discuss atomic interactions, bungee jumping, stabbing cancerous cells, and Mini Coopers.

The immune system is in a race against time to detect potentially harmful substances and remove them before they get out of hand and cause disease. Detecting a pathogen in the body is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. To speed up the process, immune cells use mechanical force to ‘see’ what’s around them. In this talk I will discuss the technology we develop to observe immune cells using force to detect and attack pathogens in real time.