Dr Richard Sear's Research  

Department of Physics, University of Surrey

This is a snapshot of a simulation by Amanda Page, a PhD student working with me. It is of a post-critical nucleus of the crystalline phase of a system of Lennard-Jones atoms. The yellow and blue colours indicate locally face-centred-cubic and hexagonal-close-packed environments so transitions from yellow to blue indicate stacking faults. Grey indicates locally icosahedral/decahedral -- there is a five-fold defect runing along one side of the crystal. The point is that as the crystal has grown defects have spontaneously formed in it. This is part of work done in collaboration with Daan Frenkel and Koos van Meel (Daan's PhD student). See here for a 3D interactive view of the snapshot.


Research into protein crystallisation: crystallisation of lysozyme. This an image of a crystal of the protein lysozyme, taken by Piyapong Asanithi, a PhD student of Dr Alan Dalton and myself. Piyapong has made films based on carbon nanotubes and used these to induce the protein lysozyme to form large crystals. The crystal shown has only formed because of the flim (the black rectangle), without it the protein solution would stable for a very long time. We have recently published a paper on this work, done in collaboration with Prof Naomi Chayen's group at Imperial.



Biological physics research: Signalling and protein dynamics inside cells. The image here is a simulated flourescence microscopy image. It is a combination of red fluoresence from a protein called Aurora B, blue from DNA and green from the phosphorylated state of a protein bound to DNA. The red background to the image is due to the fact that Aurora B is thoughout the cell. The multicoloured blobs are the chromosomes. The chromosomes are multicoloured because Aurora B is modelled as binding to DNA, and has its highest concentration near the (marked by vertical black line) centre line. Thus there is gradient of decreasing red away from the centreline and as we only see green where Aurora B has phosphorylated there is a gradient of green as well.



You can contact me at r.sear@surrey.ac.uk. Incidentally, my Erdös number is at most 4. The departmental home page is here. My Staff Page is here. Also, although my biological physics work is mainly on eukaryote cells I dabble a bit in prokaryote cells. See here for the homepage of a UK network in these beasties.