Challenges and Opportunities in Structure Determination of Membrane Proteins.

ITQB Seminar

Title: Challenges and Opportunities in Structure Determination of Membrane Proteins

Speaker: Isabel de Moraes

Affiliation: Research Group Leader and Co-ordinator of
Membrane Protein Laboratory Facilities, Imperial College London and
Diamond Light Source (honorary)

Host: Margarida Archer- Head of Membrane Protein Crystallography Laboratory

Abstract:

Membrane Protein Crystallography

 Membrane proteins are the supreme example where more effort is
needed
in structural biology. In spite of their abundance and importance,
of
the more than 60,000 protein structures in the Protein Data Bank,
only
around 200 of these structures represent unique membrane proteins.To
facilitate structural studies on membrane proteins, The Membrane
Protein
Laboratory at Diamond Light Source Ltd (Diamond-MPL) was created in
a collaboration between Imperial College London and Diamond, funded by
the Wellcome Trust.The MPL is a research and training state-of-the-art
user facility open to scientists from laboratories anywhere in the world
interested in solving the 3-dimensional structures of membrane
proteins by X-ray crystallography. Because membrane proteins are unstable,
hard to crystallise and crystals difficult to handle. More systematic
approaches and technical developments are needed to improve the success
rate of the structure determination of membrane proteins. The MPL has a
formal collaboration with I24 microfocus beamline at Diamond to
develop new techniques for crystallisation and structural determination of
membrane proteins, including prototype systems for high throughput
methods, improving handling of small and delicate crystals, and
methods for collecting and merging data from a large number of small
crystals.
The beamline is unique in its ability to deliver a tunable X-ray
beam (6– 25keV) of variable size between 5 µm and 50 µm on to crystal
samples. This versatility is coupled with a state-of-the-art pixel
array detector.