Researchers who want to develop better solar panels drool over how efficiently chloroplast proteins convert light into energy. We froze the two rings of the photon-capturing machinery down to 1°K to keep it stable. We then watched as the energy hops between molecules of the loosely packed ring (dark orange), but when it's excited further, the energy jumps to the tightly packed ring of 18 pigments (light orange), and is smeared across them. Now the energy is everywhere at once.

Researchers studying viral entry have not been able to visualize exactly how a viral particle fuses with a cell. We've developed a method whereby the different stages of fusion can be detected by the release of different fluorescent tags. We inserted blue dye into the viral membrane so that at the moment fusion occurs, these dye molecules escape into an artificial membrane sheet, throwing off a bright burst of green ligh

During replication, DNA polymerases are positioned on each strand of DNA. Using a microscope slide as an anchor, we tethered DNA to a bead and stretched it with a flow of solution. We tracked how the position of the bead changed as the replication machinery went to work. Every time a lagging strand loop is formed in the DNA, the length of the strand is reduced (middle panel). Upon release of this loop, the DNA length suddenly increases, visible as an abrupt motion of the

A Singular Focus © Wolfgang Kumm / Corbis A physicist looks at photosynthesis, replication, and viral entry, molecule by molecule. By Antoine van Oijen Article Extras 1 turned out to be an important one for me. It caught the attention of many researchers in the community, and was cited more than 200 times. More importantly it gave me a little bit of insight into biological systems. Even though I had limited interaction with biolog