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Article
Open AccessAchieving single nucleotide sensitivity in direct hybridization genome imaging
Direct visualization of point mutations in situ can be informative for studying genetic diseases and nuclear biology. We describe a direct hybridization genome imaging method with single-nucleotide sensitivity...
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Article
Open AccessEngineered helicase replaces thermocycler in DNA amplification while retaining desired PCR characteristics
Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is an essential method in molecular diagnostics and life sciences. PCR requires thermal cycling for heating the DNA for strand separation and cooling it for replication. The pro...
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Article
Open AccessImproving the specificity of nucleic acid detection with endonuclease-actuated degradation
Nucleic acid detection is essential for numerous biomedical applications, but often requires complex protocols and/or suffers false-positive readouts. Here, we describe SENTINEL, an approach that combines isot...
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Chapter
Conclusion
In this thesis, I experimentally tested several fundamental relationships that describe the thermodynamics of information for systems in contact with a single thermal reservoir.
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Chapter
Feedback Trap
Feedback traps can create arbitrary virtual potentials for exploring the dynamics of small Brownian particles. In a feedback trap, the particle position is measured periodically and, after each measurement, on...
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Chapter
High-Precision Test of Landauer’s Principle
Here, I test Landauer’s 1961 hypothesis that erasing a symmetric one-bit memory requires work of at least \(kT \ln 2\) ...
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Chapter
Thermodynamical and Logical Irreversibility
In my attempt to erase memory, I noticed that erasure protocols that differ subtly give measurably different values for the asymptotic work, a result I explain by showing that one protocol is symmetric with th...
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Chapter
Partial Memory Erasure: Testing Shannon’s Entropy Function
The entropy function for an equilibrium system has a Gibbs-Shannon form; however, there is a long, sometimes contentious debate as to whether the Gibbs-Shannon form applies to systems out of equilibrium. Here,...
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Chapter
Arbitrarily Slow, Non-quasistatic, Isothermal Transformations
Joule or free expansion of an ideal gas into a volume with a lower pressure is an example of an irreversible isothermal process. This nonequilibrium example is often used in traditional thermodynamics text boo...
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Chapter
Introduction
Thermodynamics explores laws of nature that govern processes of work, heat, matter, and information exchange between systems, subsystems, and their environments. It applies to all systems in nature, and it set...
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Chapter
Real-Time Calibration of a Feedback Trap
Feedback traps use closed-loop control to trap or manipulate small particles and molecules in solution. They have been applied to the measurement of physical and chemical properties of particles and to explore...
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Chapter
Erasure Without Work in an Asymmetric, Double-Well Potential
Here, we present an experimental study of erasure for a memory encoded in an asymmetric double-well potential. Using a feedback trap, we find that the average work to erase can be less than
