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Membrane proteins:

“at the interface between biophysics and molecular biology”

Date:

Download-files:

Time:

Thursday, 18 Nov. 2021

Video-Recording for any system with MP4-support

- Video.mp4 (ca. 435 Mb)

15:15 – 16:15

Abstract:

All living cells are surrounded by a thin lipid bilayer membrane that is

impermeable to polar molecules and ions. Membrane-embedded proteins

allow the cell to regulate the influx and efflux of small molecules/ions as well

as macromolecules, and to react to the presence of signaling molecules

in the external environment.

Membrane proteins thus serve as the cell’s gatekeepers, and are absolutely

essential to life. All-in-all, roughly 30% of the different proteins found in a

typical organism are membrane proteins, despite the fact that they occupy

only a small fraction of the total cell volume.

Having evolved to live happily in the apolar environment of a lipid bilayer,

membrane proteins are designed according to different architectural principles

than are water-soluble proteins. Moreover, the cell uses specialized “translocon”

proteins to guide membrane proteins into the membrane as they are synthesized

on the ribosome. Our main interest is to understand the molecular interactions

that drive membrane protein insertion and folding by developing molecular biology

techniques to measure physical parameters such as insertion free energies and

forces acting on the nascent protein during the membrane insertion process

in the living cell.

Speaker today: Gunnar von Heijne

(Stockholm University, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics)