Title: Structure and function of membrane transport proteins
Host: Prof. Nieng YAN.
Time:10:00 am, Nov. 14, 2012.
Venue: Medicine Building Room B323
Coordinator: Ying Liu (liuying1206@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn )
Please reply to Ying Liu (liuying1206@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn), if you are interested in one or more of the following activities.
1, One-on-one meeting in the afternoon with Prof. Ming Zhou after his lecture.
2, Lunch with Prof. Ming Zhou. (Please let your lab members know that staffs and students are welcome.)
3, Dinner with Prof. Ming Zhou
Thank you for your attention!
The website of Ming Zhou’s introduction: http://physiology.columbia.edu/MingZhou.html
Abstract :
To serve in their role as mediators of transmembrane flux of membrane-impermeable small molecules, membrane transport proteins must carry out three crucial functions: to selectively identify their cognate ligands while excluding other molecules, to stabilize and facilitate transport of polar and charged ligands in the inhospitably hydrophobic environment of the cell membrane, and to modulate their activity to allow the cell to respond rapidly to changes in the environment or its own metabolic state. Understanding how these defining properties of membrane transport proteins are encoded into their three-dimensional structures is a challenge currently facing the field of structural biology, both because channel and transporter function is an essential part of fundamental biological processes, and because they are important targets for drug development given their physiological roles in many diseases and accessibility from the extracellular space. To understand the mechanisms of transporters and channels, we first obtain an atomic resolution three-dimensional structure, and then use a combined structural, functional, and computational approach to examine structure-based hypotheses. Two examples, a mammalian channel that conducts urea and a bacterial transporter that translocates bile acid across the cell membrane, will be presented in the seminar. |
