Date : 12/09/2011

Internship proposal for : Master 2

Laboratory
Laboratoire de Biologie Physico-Chimique des Protéines Membranaires
UMR 7099 CNRS
IBPC 13 rue Pierre et Marie Curie 75005 Paris
Website : http://www.ibpc.fr/UMR7099/
Main discipline : Biophysics
Lab director : Bruno Miroux

Mentor
Dror Warschawski
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tél : +33 1 58 41 51 11

Subjects
1.: structural biology
2.: membrane proteins
3.: in cell NMR

Tools and methodologies
1.: Nuclear Magnetic Resonance
2.: membrane biochemistry
3.: microbiology

Summary of lab's interests

The Laboratory of Physical and Chemical Biology of Membrane Proteins integrates approaches from protein expression to structural and functional studies by x-ray crystallography, mass spectrometry, solution and solid-state NMR of membrane proteins. Our activities cover domains of fundamental and medical biology: bioenergetics, signal transduction, genetic screening methods, structure-function studies, bacterial transporters and ion channels...

Summary of project

In recent years, our team have lead the first structural study of a membrane protein by solid-state NMR in France, on the mechanosensitive channel MscL (Abdine, J Magn Reson 2010). We have produced this protein in E. coli and by in vitro synthesis (Abdine, New Biotechnol 2011). The expertise we have gained leads us to develop a new and ambitious approach: in cell solid-state NMR (Fu, J Am Chem Soc 2011), using strains developed and patented in the laboratory by Bruno Miroux (Miroux, J Mol Biol 1996), which overexpress the inner membrane and the subunit b of the E. coli ATP synthase. Several strains should be tested under conditions that allow for isotopic labeling of the proteins. Solid-state NMR will be tested on whole cells or purified native membranes of these bacteria. The goal is to optimize the sample preparation, to obtain the best spectral resolution possible, which can provide structural or dynamic information on the observed membrane proteins. This approach can then be transposed to other proteins that we study in the laboratory, such as mechanosensitive channels or GPCRs (G protein-coupled receptors, Catoire, J Am Chem Soc 2010).