María García-Parajo
Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology

Editor, Cell Biophysics
Biophysical Journal

What are you currently working on that excites you?

Biomolecular interactions in living cells are highly coordinated in space and time, with modularity playing a major role in tuning molecular function and cell response. We are interested in understanding the rules that govern modularity and spatiotemporal compartmentalization to regulate cellular function. For this, we develop and apply a battery of single-molecule fluorescence-based techniques that include different forms of super-resolution microscopy combined with single-molecule imaging and tracking in living cells. We focus on two main biological processes of fundamental interest: plasma membrane organization and intracellular dynamics and transport. These processes are sensitive to the mechanical environment, and we aim to understand how mechanical stimuli are sensed at the level of individual molecules, how they influence the modularity and spatiotemporal compartmentalization of molecules, and how this affects cellular function.

At a cocktail party of non-scientists, how would you explain what you do?

Individual molecules in living cells are similar to individual persons in our society. Each of us has a defined personality. However, we don't function in an isolated manner, but instead we interact with others, and these interactions ultimately define particular functions: from being a parent and a partner to having a given job or providing service to our community. Importantly, we are not only parents or professionals: we diversify our functions by interacting with others depending on the place where we are (spatial compartments) and for a given time (dynamics). In our research, we engineer highly sophisticated microscopes with extreme sensitivity to spy on the behavior of thousands of individual molecules to reconstruct cell function from their dynamic interactions.