Recent developments on fluorescent proteins and microscopy techniques have allowed the probing of single molecules in a living bacterial cell with high specificity, millisecond time resolution, and nanometer spatial precision. Recording movies and analyzing dynamics of individual macromolecules have brought new insights into the mechanisms of many processes in molecular biology, such as DNA-protein interactions, gene regulation, transcription, translation, and replication, among others. Here we review the key methods of single-molecule detection and highlight numerous examples to illustrate how these experiments are contributing to the quantitative understanding of the fundamental processes in a living cell.

中文翻译：

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活细菌细胞中分子生物学的单分子方法。

荧光蛋白和显微镜技术的最新发展已允许以高特异性，毫秒时间分辨率和纳米空间精度探测活细菌细胞中的单个分子。录制电影和分析单个大分子的动力学已经为分子生物学中许多过程的机制带来了新见解，例如DNA-蛋白质相互作用，基因调控，转录，翻译和复制等。在这里，我们回顾了单分子检测的关键方法，并重点介绍了许多例子，以说明这些实验如何有助于定量了解活细胞的基本过程。