Although there have been many studies of proteins whose primary function is to ‘sculpt’ the surface of membranes e.g. BAR domains, there have been very few investigations of what effect regular membrane proteins have on the stiffness of membranes. Here we show via very large simulations, using the MARTINI coarse-grained forcefield, that ‘regular’ integral membrane […]
Lipids are not free to diffuse around the cell membrane. Rather they are constrained not just by all the embedded proteins but also by the cytoskeleton, which, it has been suggested, corral the lipids. In this paper, we show by very large coarse-grained simulations of a realistic model of the plasma membrane how compartmentalisation leads […]
PepT1 is a nutrient transporter found in the cells that line your small intestine. It is not only responsible for the uptake of di- and tai-peptides, and therefore much of your dietary proteins, but also the uptake of most β-lactam antibiotics. This serendipity ensures that we can take (many of) these important drugs orally. Our […]
PepT1 is a nutrient transporter found in the cells that line your small intestine. It is not only responsible for the uptake of di- and tai-peptides, and therefore much of your dietary proteins, but also the uptake of most β-lactam antibiotics. This serendipity ensures that we can take (many of) these important drugs orally. Our […]
In much of my research I’ve looked at how proteins embedded in cell membranes behave. An important part in any simulation of a membrane protein is, obviously, putting it into a model membrane, often a square patch of several hundred lipid molecules. This is surprisingly difficult: although a slew of methods have been published, none of […]
In this paper we show how we built and then simulated a model of the influenza A virion. Rather than model every atom of every lipid, a “coarse-grained” representation (MARTINI) is instead used which replaces roughly every four atoms by a single coarse-grained bead. Microsecond simulations then start to give us insight into how the […]