Cell Signaling Reactions: Single-molecular Kinetic Analysis

Cell Signaling Reactions Yasushi Sako l Masahiro Ueda Editors Cell Signaling Reactions Single-Molecular Kinetic Analysis Editor Yasushi Sako Cellular Informatics Laboratory RIKEN Advanced Science Institute Wako, Japan [email protected] Masahiro Ueda Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences Osaka University, and JST, CREST Suita, Japan [email protected] u.ac.jp ISBN 978 90 481 9863 4 e ISBN 978 90 481 9864 1 DOI 10.1007/978 90 481 9864 1 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2010937431 # Springer ScienceþBusiness Media B.V. 2011 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid free paper Springer is part of Springer ScienceþBusiness Media (www.springer.com) Preface The biological cell, the minimal unit of life, is an extremely complicated reaction web. The human genome project has revealed that 20,000 30,000 genes are encoded in single human cells; these genes are thought to produce more than 100,000 protein species through alternative splicing and chemical modification. The major challenge of biology in the post-genomic era is to address the issue of how such a multi-element system, composed of huge numbers of protein species and other macro- and micro-molecules, brings emergence of the complex and flexible reaction dynamics that we call “life.” Biological macromolecules such as proteins are themselves complicated systems made up of a huge number of atoms. Proteins often show complex structural and functional dynamics. It has been demonstrated that single-molecule techniques are powerful tools in the study of proteins, because time series of the individual events carried out by a single molecule provide information that cannot be obtained with ensemble-molecule measurements and that is indispensable in analyses of the complex behaviors of biological macromolecules. Single-