The fantastic single-molecule techniques

Abstract

In the past 40 years, single-molecule techniques have been rapidly developed and widely applied in numerous fields of biology researches, offering new insights that conventional biochemical assays cannot discover. In this review, to help fully appreciate the powerfulness of single-molecule methods, we systemically summarize the various advantages of performing biochemical assays at the single-molecule level. Inspired by these examples, we propose a new single-molecule polysome profiling technique, to demonstrate that this strategy is not limited to the few special "outliers". Finally, we point out a possibility in the future of unifying different biochemical assays on the platform of single-molecule microscopy, which will reduce the cost of instrumentation and inevitably promote the applicability and adoptability of new biochemical and biophysical methods.