DEER Studies of Membrane Proteins

Computational studies on membrane proteins and membrane-drug interactions

The cell membrane is a gateway to the cell and immersion point for membrane proteins and thus is of interest for pharmacology and structural biology. This thesis aims to study its interaction with water, small molecules, polymers and proteins through molecular dynamics simulation and statistical analysis. In the first part of the thesis, I have performed a statistical analysis of membrane prote...

DEER distance measurements on proteins.

Distance distributions between paramagnetic centers in the range of 1.8 to 6 nm in membrane proteins and up to 10 nm in deuterated soluble proteins can be measured by the DEER technique. The number of paramagnetic centers and their relative orientation can be characterized. DEER does not require crystallization and is not limited with respect to the size of the protein or protein complex. Diama...

Structural studies of membrane proteins using transmission electron microscopy

Overexpression of membrane proteins in mammalian cells for structural studies

The number of structures of integral membrane proteins from higher eukaryotes is steadily increasing due to a number of innovative protein engineering and crystallization strategies devised over the last few years. However, it is sobering to reflect that these structures represent only a tiny proportion of the total number of membrane proteins encoded by a mammalian genome. In addition, the str...

Simulation studies of the interactions between membrane proteins and detergents.

Interactions between membrane proteins and detergents are important in biophysical and structural studies and are also biologically relevant in the context of folding and transport. Despite a paucity of high-resolution data on protein-detergent interactions, novel methods and increased computational power enable simulations to provide a means of understanding such interactions in detail. Simula...