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Terence STRICK

Paris

« Our mission: to help democratize the use of single-molecule approaches in labs interested in taking the leap to the nanoscale. We operate in and foster an open and supportive collaborative environment where anybody and everybody is welcome to visit. »

Biography

As an undergraduate in the Physics Department of Princeton University from 1990 to 1994, I received four years of training in theoretical and experimental physics. I also had the opportunity to explore fields adjacent to physics, and started studying biology at the same time. After graduating with Honors I successfully competed for admission to the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, France where I continued to study phyics and biology and carried out my PhD research under the supervision of David Bensimon and Vincent Croquette in the Statistical Physics Laboratory of the Physics Department, At that time I proposed to David and Vincent the first design of what is now known as the magnetic trap and built the protoype instrument and DNA substrates which allowed for single-molecule analysis of DNA's mechanical response to supercoiling.

Research topics

Our research efforts lead us to simultaneously pursue both fundamental and applied topics, focusing on the expression of genetic information and the development of novel techniques to detect discrete molecular interactions in real-time and at single-molecule resolution. We are particularly interested in the mechanisms underlying prokaryotic and eukaryotic transcription. Our longstanding interest in the properties of DNA have also led us to invest heavily into the study of DNA repair, presumably one of the most vital functions of the cell. Most recently, we have begun to consider DNA as a useful nanomaterial for the localization and control of molecular species such as protein and drug molecules.

Fields of interest

Technologies


Applications

Dynatwist

by scDNA

Dynatwist is a supercoilable double-stranded DNA molecules with exceptional stability and high purity (> 95%).

Several publications

Kostrz D, Wayment-Steele HK, Wang JL, Follenfant M, Pande VS, Strick TR, Gosse C. A modular DNA scaffold to study protein-protein interactions at single-molecule resolution. Nat Nanotechnol. 2019 Oct;14(10):988-993. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-019-0542-7

Wang S, Han Z, Libri D, Porrua O, Strick TR. Single-molecule characterization of extrinsic transcription termination by Sen1 helicase. Nat Commun. 2019 Apr 4;10(1):1545. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09560-9

Wang JL, Duboc C, Wu Q, Ochi T, Liang S, Tsutakawa SE, Lees-Miller SP, Nadal M, Tainer JA, Blundell TL, Strick TR. Dissection of DNA double-strand-break repair using novel single-molecule forceps. Nat Struct Mol Biol. 2018 Jun;25(6):482-487. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-018-0065-1

Fan J, Leroux-Coyau M, Savery NJ, Strick TR. Reconstruction of bacterial transcription-coupled repair at single-molecule resolution. Nature. 2016 Aug 11;536(7615):234-7. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19080

Lerner E, Chung S, Allen BL, Wang S, Lee J, Lu SW, Grimaud LW, Ingargiola A, Michalet X, Alhadid Y, Borukhov S, Strick TR, Taatjes DJ, Weiss S. Backtracked and paused transcription initiation intermediate of Escherichia coli RNA polymerase. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Oct 25;113(43):E6562-E6571. https://www.pnas.org/content/113/43/E6562.long

Graves ET, Duboc C, Fan J, Stransky F, Leroux-Coyau M, Strick TR. A dynamic DNA-repair complex observed by correlative single-molecule nanomanipulation and fluorescence. Nat Struct Mol Biol. 2015 Jun;22(6):452-7. https://www.nature.com/articles/nsmb.3019

Howan K, Smith AJ, Westblade LF, Joly N, Grange W, Zorman S, Darst SA, Savery NJ, Strick TR. Initiation of transcription-coupled repair characterized at single-molecule resolution. Nature. 2012 Oct 18;490(7420):431-4. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11430

Ramreddy T, Sachidanandam R, Strick TR. Real-time detection of cruciform extrusion by single-molecule DNA nanomanipulation. Nucleic Acids Res. 2011 May;39(10):4275-83. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105387/

Revyakin A, Liu C, Ebright RH, Strick TR. Abortive initiation and productive initiation by RNA polymerase involve DNA scrunching. Science. 2006 Nov 17;314(5802):1139-43. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5802/1139.long

Strick TR, Allemand JF, Bensimon D, Bensimon A, Croquette V. The elasticity of a single supercoiled DNA molecule. Science. 1996 Mar 29;271(5257):1835-7. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/271/5257/1835.long