Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia worldwide. The pathogenesis of this neurodegenerative disease, currently without curative treatment, is associated with the accumulation of amyloid β (Aβ) in brain parenchyma and cerebral vasculature. AD patients are unable to clear this toxic peptide, leading to Aβ accumulation in their brains and, presumably, the pathology associat...

Membrane proteins are embedded in a lipid bilayer and interact with the lipid molecules in subtle ways. This can be studied experimentally by examining the effect of different lipid bilayers on the function of membrane proteins. Understanding the causes of the functional effects of lipids is difficult to dissect experimentally but more amenable to a computational approach. Here we perform molec...

Lipid-bilayers are the fundamental constituents of the walls of most living cells and lipid vesicles, giving them shape and compartment. The formation and growing of pores in a lipid bilayer have attracted considerable attention from an energetic point of view in recent years. Such pores permit targeted delivery of drugs and genes to the cell, and regulate the concentration of various molecules...

Nanodiscs are phospholipid-protein complexes which are relevant to nascent high-density lipoprotein and are applicable as a drug carrier and a tool to immobilize membrane proteins. We evaluated the structure and dynamics of the nanoparticles consisting of dimyristoylphosphatidylcholine (DMPC) and apolipoprotein A-I (apoA-I) with small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) and fluorescence methods and...

Viruses are nanoscale entities containing a nucleic acid genome encased in a protein shell called a capsid and in some cases are surrounded by a lipid bilayer membrane. This review summarizes the physics that govern the processes by which capsids assemble within their host cells and in vitro. We describe the thermodynamics and kinetics for the assembly of protein subunits into icosahedral capsi...

Synthetic mannose-containing glycolipids utilizing the cholesterol nucleus as a lipid anchor, and either the 6-aminohexyl- or the 6-(6-aminohexanamido)hexyl-1-thio-alpha-D-mannopyranosides as the carbohydrate ligands, have been synthesized and incorporated into small unilamellar liposomes. Incorporation of these cholesterol-mannoside derivatives at concentrations up to 14 mol% apparently does n...

Understanding the mechanisms underlying ion channel function from the atomic-scale requires accurate ab initio modelling as well as careful experiments. Here, we present a density functional theory (DFT) study of the ion channel gramicidin A (gA), whose inner pore conducts only monovalent cations and whose conductance has been shown to depend on the side chains of the amino acids in the channel...

Detailed structural information on human exchangeable apolipoproteins (apo) is required to understand their functions in lipid transport. Using a series of deletion mutants that progressively lacked different regions along the molecule, we probed the structural organization of lipid-free human apoA-I and the role of different domains in lipid binding, making comparisons to apoE, which is a memb...

A fully synthetic carbohydrate-based cancer vaccine is an attractive concept, but an important topic in the area is to develop proper vaccine carriers that can improve the immunogenicity and other immunological properties of tumor-associated carbohydrate antigens (TACAs). In this context, four monophosphoryl derivatives of Neisseria meningitidis lipid A were synthesized via a highly convergent ...

Infection is the leading cause of death in severely burned patients that survive the acute phase of injury. Neutrophils are the first line of defense against infections, but hospitalized burn patients frequently cannot mount an appropriate innate response to infection. Thus, immune therapeutic approaches aimed at improving neutrophil functions after burn injury may be beneficial. Prophylactic t...