Paul R. Selvin

Paul Selvin, a physics professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has invented and applied fluorescence-based methods to elucidate the conformational dynamics of important biological macromolecules. Early on he invented the lanthanide resonance energy transfer (LRET) technique, which offered a 100-fold improvement in signal-to-background over conventional fluorescence resonance energy transfer. Using another technique he developed with his students, Selvin demonstrated 1.5-nm spatial localization of single fluorescent molecules with 1–500 ms temporal resolution, a technique he named FIONA. Using FIONA, Selvin’s group determined the hand-over-hand locomotion mechanism of single-molecule myosin V, myosin VI, and kinesin in vitro and then determined the step size and stepping rate of kinesin and dynein in vivo. With these and other discoveries, Selvin has made seminal contributions to our understanding of the structural dynamics of biological macromolecules at the nanometer scale and to the development of advanced instrumentation for single-molecule biophysics.