John Ross of Stanford University is supported by an award from the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry program for research involving the theoretical determination of complex reaction mechanisms from experimental data and a number of related topics. One of these additional topics involves developing a theory for the transition from deterministic kinetics to stochastic kinetics, important in a variety of settings including the molecularly crowded world of the cell. Another involves the analysis of single molecule kinetics and the exploration of a new "chemical indetermination principle" which Ross suggests would be similar to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. A third project involves the development of pulse sequences to extract mechanistic information from complex reaction networks and is being done in collaboration with three experimental groups, two of them at Stanford, the third at West Virginia University. The work is expected to have a broad impact on the fields of genomics and metabolomics through the development of new methods to extract information from complex reaction environments such as the cell. Ross is planning to disseminate the results of this and prior NSF-supported research through the publication of a textbook, co-authored with two former students and entitled "On the Determination of Reaction Mechanisms."
