Dynamics and folding of a membrane protein and transcription activator

脂质膜包围着所有的动物、植物和细菌细胞。嵌入脂质中的蛋白质通道和受体精确地控制营养物质、废物、能量和信息进出细胞的流动，但人们对此知之甚少。我们的长期目标是开发方法来克服膜蛋白结构，折叠和动力学分析中的许多困难。最近，我们在研究细菌膜蛋白的折叠方面取得了进展，甘油促进剂在洗涤剂环境中。我们建议继续这项工作，通过应用一种新的方法合成的蛋白质，使用细胞提取物和研究折叠的蛋白质在脂质膜环境。 无细胞合成开辟了用同位素标记蛋白质的可能性，用于通过核磁共振（NMR）光谱分析，这是一种类似于磁共振成像（MRI）的方法。 通过标记蛋白质，我们将研究蛋白质的详细原子动力学，这是理解其生物运输机制的关键。我们也将继续我们的工作沿着类似的路线对真菌抗生素肽丙甲霉素，这是一个模型膜蛋白。

A lipid membrane surrounds all animal, plant, and bacterial cells. Protein channels and receptors embedded in the lipid precisely control the flow of nutrients, waste products, energy, and information into and out of cells, but are poorly understood. Our long-term goal is to develop methods to overcome the many difficulties in membrane protein structure, folding and dynamics analysis. Recently, we have made progress in studying the folding of a bacterial membrane protein, the glycerol facilitator in detergent environments. We propose to continue this work by applying a new method for synthesizing the protein using cellular extracts and studying folding of the protein in a lipid membrane environment. Cell-free synthesis opens up the possibility of labelling the protein with isotopes for analysis by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, a method analogous to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). With labeled protein, we will study the detailed atomic dynamics of the protein that are key to understanding its biological transport mechanism. We will also continue our work along similar lines on the fungal antibiotic peptide alamethicin that is a model membrane protein.