Two papers describe how a membrane protein can move both lipids and ions
Tuesday, March 12, 2019 - 08:00
in Biology & Nature
The TMEM16 family of membrane proteins was hailed as representing the elusive calcium-activated chloride channels. However, the majority of the family members turned out to be scramblases, proteins that shuffle lipids between both sides of a lipid membrane, some also with non-selective ion conductance. In a new study on both mammalian and fungal proteins of the TMEM16 family, Cristina Paulino, head of the cryo-EM unit at the Structural Biology department at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and colleagues from the University of Zürich, Switzerland, have shown what the structures of these proteins reveal about their function. The results were published in two back-to-back papers in the journal eLife on 12 March.