Ren Lim

I joined the Department of Physics as a DPhil student in October 2010. My supervisor is Dr. Richard Berry and our research group is interested in the biological physics of molecular motors.

Outside work, I am a keen footballer, and enjoy both cooking and blind wine tasting. I am a graduate member of St. Catherine's College (St Catz) and I am involved on the bar committee of the Middle Common Room (MCR) where I help select the wine for formal and guest dinner events.

The aim of my current research project is to apply external torque on the bacterial flagellar motor. This motor is about 45 nm in diameter and is driven by flux of protons or sodium ions across the cytoplasmic membrane.

The reason why I am interested to do this is because I want to be able to measure the torque-speed relationship of a single motor under different conditions. This will then allow better models that describe the torque-generating mechanism of the motor to be developed.

There are several ways to apply external torque on the motor. Only one method has been carried out which is by use of electrorotation [1]. Currently, I am working to apply optical torque on the bacterial flagellar motor, a method also known as an "optical spanner" [2] or "optical torque wrench" [3]. The optical spanner requires the use of birefringent microparticles which can be made to rotate using the polarisation of light [2-4]. The other method of applying external torque is by use of magnetic tweezers which still remains to be explored.

I am working in collaboration with Franceso Pedaci, Maarten van Oene and Remko van Luik from Nynke Dekker's lab in the Kavli Institute of NanoScience of the Faculty of Applied Sciences at TU Delft.

Funding for this research mainly comes from BBSRC while my living stipend and fees are covered for by the DANA Scholarship from the Prime Ministers' Office of the Brunei Government.