User:Vbooth

Proteins are the body's "molecular machines" and are central in the countless processes that maintain all living organisms. A protein's function comes about as a direct result of the particular features of its three-dimensional structure. Thus, we need to know this structure in order to properly understand how a protein works, as well as to design drugs to modify the protein's function to treat a disease. The details of this structure are too small to be seen directly, even in the most highly magnified images, and so we use techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to determine the structure. Proteins that are embedded in the cell's membrane constitute about one-third of all proteins and are especially important in health and disease. These membrane-associated proteins pose unique technical challenges and relatively little is currently known about their structures. However, recent advances in both making the protein samples and using NMR to determine their structures mean that many membrane proteins are now amenable to structure determination for the very first time. In order to make the most of the NMR data, we combine this data with computer simulation. We use NMR and computational approaches (e.g. GROMACS) to reveal the underlying mechanisms behind the function of several membrane-associated proteins.