Membrane magic

A Prize for Membrane Magic

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to James Rothman, Randy Schekman, and Thomas Südhof "for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells". I present a personal view of the membrane trafficking field, highlighting the contributions of these three Nobel laureates in a historical context.

Membrane proteins, magic-angle spinning, and in-cell NMR.

I n PNAS, Renault et al. (1) describe an advance that will help reveal the atomic details of membrane proteins in living cells. Membrane proteins comprise one-third of all cellular proteins, including biologically crucial molecules such as ion channels, G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), and transporters. The GPCR superfamily alone comprises nearly half of our current drug targets. Despite th...

The Magic of Bicelles Lights Up Membrane Protein Structure

Are Lebed's Magic Angles Truly Magic?

We report high-resolution angle-dependent measurements of the Periodic Orbit Resonance (POR) effect in (TMTSF):CI04. We observe additional harmonic resonances that were not observed in previous studies. By measuring over a broad range of frequency, field, and field orientation, we find that all of the POR evolve from the Lebed magic angles observed in dc (co = O) AMRO measurements. However, we ...

On Barycentric-Magic Graphs

Let $A$ be an abelian group. A graph $G=(V,E)$ is said to be $A$-barycentric-magic if there exists a labeling $l:E(G)longrightarrow Asetminuslbrace{0}rbrace$ such that the induced vertex set labeling $l^{+}:V(G)longrightarrow A$ defined by $l^{+}(v)=sum_{uvin E(G)}l(uv)$ is a constant map and also satisfies that $l^{+}(v)=deg(v)l(u_{v}v)$ for all $v in V$, and for some vertex $u_{v}$ adjacent t...