Temperature locking in-membrane electrophoresis to study protein-protein interactions

Biological membranes and the proteins contained within them are fundamental to the most important processes in biology. Understanding the functionality of these membranes gives us insight into these processes and has applications in the development of various technologies, including drug delivery systems, energy production and biosensors. One biological system where inter-protein interactions are crucial is photosynthesis, where the efficiency of energy capture and subsequent biomass production depends upon a network of well-organized membrane proteins.

Over the past two years, I developed a technique that uses an electric field to control the movement of photosynthetic membrane proteins within a model of a biological membrane. This creates protein concentration gradients, allowing a range of inter-protein interactions to be studied in a single sample. At high concentrations the average distance between proteins will be shorter than at low concentrations, so they will interact more strongly. The rough location of fluorescent proteins can be assessed with optical microscopy, however, a limitation is that visualising the nanoscale arrangement of proteins is a challenge due to system being naturally dynamic.

My vision is to leverage lipid phase transitions to immobilize proteins after electrophoresis. Biomembranes will be assembled using lipids that have easily accessible transition temperatures. By adjusting the temperature I will switch the lipids from a fluid to a solid phase and "lock" proteins in place, enabling subsequent structural imaging. This method can be utilised to capture physical and optical snapshots of intermediate states of protein re-organisation and to probe how protein function is affected by their interactions.

This fundamental research offers future potential for applications in plant genetics to increase yields of crops, and bio-hybrid solar energy production where plants are used in conjunction with nanotechnology for renewable energy production.