Major funding award for cell membrane science

£1.75 million new funding for biophysics team<em> - News</em>

By Danielle Reeves
Wednesday 19 November 2008

A group of chemistry researchers at Imperial College has been awarded £1.75 million by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to study various aspects of cell membrane structure and function, using analytical techniques from the physical sciences.

Understanding how cell membranes work is important because there is more to their role in the cell than merely providing a barrier between the contents of a cell and the outside world, and forming compartments within the cell, as Professor John Seddon, principal investigator of the new project explains:

Fluorescently-labelled drug molecules are seen binding to artificial model membranes

"Cell membranes are highly-active interfaces: for example, they control, activate and deactivate many vitally important cell functions, are involved in cell signalling, and are the binding sites for over 80 percent of all commercially available drugs. We believe that physical interactions such as the elasticity of the membrane and its tendency for curvature are intimately involved in many of these processes. There is a subtle interplay between lipids and membrane proteins in controlling membrane structure and protein function", he said.

Cell membranes are made of two asymmetrical layers of lipid molecules. One of the objectives of the new project is to better understand the consequences of this lipid asymmetry. In addition the researchers aim to develop new methods for producing model membranes which are asymmetric as well, in order to provide more realistic experimental models than are currently available.

Furthermore, the platform grant will provide the research team with the flexibility with which to tackle other emerging areas in membrane biophysics including drug-membrane interactions which are of importance to the pharmaceutical industry, and the mechanisms by which cells dynamically control the make-up of their membranes.

This field of research is known as membrane biophysics because the researchers apply analytical techniques which originated in the physical sciences to investigate model and real biological membrane systems. The techniques used by the Imperial researchers in this project include nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction and optical microscopy.

An additional aim of the new project is to encourage closer collaborations between scientists across the UK working in membrane biophysics. As such, the Imperial team will organise three national workshops over the next five years, and will hold researcher exchange programmes, encouraging scientists from Imperial and other institutions to visit each other's labs and learn from each other's methods.

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