Aqueous micellar systems in membrane protein crystallization

Effects of impurities on membrane-protein crystallization in different systems

When starting a protein-crystallization project, scientists are faced with several unknowns. Amongst them are these questions: (i) is the purity of the starting material sufficient? and (ii) which type of crystallization experiment is the most promising to conduct? The difficulty in purifying active membrane-protein samples for crystallization trials and the high costs associated with producing...

Crystallization of Membrane Protein Nanoparticles

The self-assembly of membrane proteins from solution into two-dimensional crystals is studied numerically using a continuum model proposed by Talanquer and Oxtoby (J. Chem. Phys. 109, 223 (1998)). Although the mean field theory presented here is only qualitatively accurate in two dimensions, we obtain the main features of the crystal nucleation process, such as the nucleation free energy barrie...

A pedestrian guide to membrane protein crystallization.

Membrane protein structural biology is a frontier area of modern biomedical research. Twenty to thirty-five percent of the proteins encoded by an organism's genome are integral membrane proteins. Integral membrane proteins, such as channels, transporters, and receptors, are critical components of many fundamental biological processes. Also, many integral membrane proteins are important in biome...

The Membrane Protein LeuT in Micellar Systems: Aggregation Dynamics and Detergent Binding to the S2 Site

Structural and functional properties of integral membrane proteins are often studied in detergent micellar environments (proteomicelles), but how such proteomicelles form and organize is not well understood. This makes it difficult to evaluate the relationship between the properties of the proteins measured in such a detergent-solubilized form and under native conditions. To obtain mechanistic ...

A Simple Complexation Model and the Experimental Datafor Protein Extraction Using Reverse Micellar Systems