Collective Molecular Dynamic in proteins and membranes

即使生物膜已经被研究了几十年，在分子水平上揭示的与生物学相关的过程也很少。原因是纳米尺度非常小，同时皮秒和纳秒的动态非常快，这对实验提出了特别的挑战。这种动力学涉及从脂分子和小蛋白基团的快速运动到减缓大面积膜区域和膜嵌入蛋白的构象变化的过程。因此，生物材料被认为是“多尺度”材料，为了充分表征波动，实验必须涵盖尽可能大的长度和时间尺度范围。这个问题只能通过使用多种物理技术和工具来解决。我们建议结合中子、X射线和光散射技术来进行“宽带膜和蛋白质光谱学”。

Even that biological membranes have been studied for decades, very few biologically relevant processes could be revealed on a molecular level. The reason is the combination of very small nanometer length scales and at the same time very fast dynamics of pico- and nanoseconds, which poses particular experimental challenges. The dynamics involve processes from fast motions of lipid molecules and small protein groups to slow conformational changes of large membrane areas and of membrane embedded proteins. Biological materials are therefore considered as "multi-scale" materials and in order to fully characterize the fluctuations experiments must cover an as large as possible range of length and time scales. This issue can only be addressed by using multiple physical techniques and instruments. We propose to combine neutron, x-ray and light scattering techniques to conduct "broadband membrane and protein spectroscopy".