On Thursday, February 20th the many members of UB’s physics department began to gather outside a small classroom in the Natural Sciences Complex on the university’s north campus. Murmured conversation between sips of coffee ushered in a sense of quiet academic excitement. As the attendees enter the room, many took their turn introducing themselves to the speaker, Dr. Marilyn Gunner of The City College of New York. She greeted each with a measured mix of confidence and professionalism, answering questions with a smile.
Dr. Gunner began her presentation with a simple question. “How does biology store energy?” she asks, pacing the front of the room. As physicists, many of the talks attendants are familiar with the chemistry behind energy. Batteries and electricity are both a large part of the introductory physics classes taught at the university by many of the professors attending the talk. Though batteries and electricity are useful in the mechanics of the physical world, life’s methods are more obscure and temperamental. The first example brought forward by Dr. Gunner centered around plants and their use of a tiny part of their chloroplast called Photosystem Two. “Light and the sun is the original source of energy in plants.” Said Dr. Gunner, displaying a diagram reminiscent of two sets of stairs falling and rising into one another “When light energy collected by photosynthesis excites a photosystem, it ‘kicks’ the next reaction into taking place.”. Despite how this part of photosynthesis is clear to scientists at large, according to the speaker, we still do not know how a small cluster of Manganese removes electrons from water in order to provide the electron fuel for the photosystem to excite. This mystery seemed to send a few of the individuals in the room to pondering, as it was followed by a soft murmur amid the audience.
The chemicals produced by this kind of reaction are sent to the mitochondria, an organelle within cells that uses biological borders and proton crossings to store and produce energy chemically. According to Dr. Gunner, the study of how these crossings produced energy was the focus of many scientists work in her field, and when just the shapes of the proteins that helped out with these interactions were discovered, each study won Nobel Prizes. Ultimately, determining the shapes of these proteins allowed scientists to make the conclusion: moving proteins across a chemical gradient gave enough energy to move protons in a way that could store energy.
Finally, Dr. Gunner began to speak of her role in the ongoing study of the role these proteins play in the storage of energy. Her lab’s focus was the use of water, acids and voltage around the protein to change its shape and structure in subtle ways to see how it affected their ability to function. A laborious effort that could take weeks or even months to get right. Oxidation from water was something she specifically referenced as “particularly difficult”, that “if we didn’t work in water, much of biological chemistry would be solved by now”. Due to the dubious nature of water and its interactions with the molecules she works with, Dr. Gunner made clear that a majority of her experiments use computers to simulate these reactions on an extremely controlled scale.
She concluded her talk much like she began it, taking questions from the audience with a smile, and inviting others to come and speak with her personally to satisfy their curiosities. The scientific community at UB contains a contagious curiosity, as many of the various attendant’s questions sparked new ones. Networking concluded the talk with a casual and concerted discussion of goals and possibilities, two types of thoughts that are always on the minds of those who push science into the future.
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