Watching lipid pumps at work

The secretory pathway comprises a complex machinery in which several protein families work coordinately to ensure movement of membrane and cargo to different cellular compartments. Specific membrane pumps, termed lipid flippases, play an essential role in this process but how do they work and how are they regulated? We employ newly developed biophysical methods to measure the activity of lipid flippases.

 

You will work on the purification and reconstitution of lipid flippases into liposomes and nanodiscs of defined lipid composition. The lipid transport activity of the reconstituted proteins can be measured directly by using fluorescent lipid probes or by following the shape change in giant vesicles that can be observed with an optical microscope.

 

Applied techniques: membrane protein purification, co-immunoprecipitation and reconstitution, bioimaging. The work will be carried out at the PUMPKIN Centre of Excellence in the Faculty of Life Sciences.