Life at Berkeley for the past 57 years involved research on the thermodynamics, kinetics, and spectroscopic properties of RNA to better understand its structures, interactions, and functions. We (myself and all the graduate students and postdocs who shared in the fun) began with dinucleoside phosphates and slowly worked our way up to megadalton-sized RNA molecular motors. We used UV absorption, circular dichroism, circular intensity differential scattering, fluorescence, NMR, and single-molecule methods. We learned a lot and had fun doing it.
Keywords: NMR; RNA structure; circular dichroism; laser tweezers; ribosome; translation.