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Billions of cells – of different shapes and sizes – form the structure of a human body. Each membrane is surrounded by a membrane that acts as a hostess and security. It receives certain information in the cell while ensuring that its components do not spread in the vacuum of the body. Much is known about the functioning of different parts of a cell, but an important understanding of how proteins interact with the cell membrane has remained until now a mystery, as a result of a recent study conducted at the University of Missouri.
"When we think about the fundamental components of living systems, proteins are among the most important, including nucleic acids," said Gavin King, an badociate professor of physics at the MU College of Arts and Sciences, and badociate badociate professor . of biochemistry. "Proteins have more activity in the cell than DNA."
Proteins are the working horses of a cell. About 30% of the proteins in a given cell interact frequently with the membranes or reside in them to facilitate and regulate the flow of information and materials into and out of the cells. Using high precision atomic force microscopy experiments, King's team measured the force needed for proteins to break off the membrane.
"Imagine you're fishing and your fishing rod is a force microscope," King said. "At the end of our fishing rod, we tied a lure, or in this case a very short protein.A very careful and controlled, we lowered the fishing rod near a membrane.We can not not control or observe directly, the lure is frequently bitten by the fish, which in this case is the membrane.When the fish bite, we can pull it back and we can ask what force it takes to get it out of the mouth of the What surprised us was that if you repeat the same experiment over and over again, you will get different results, and we had a hard time finding a model that could accommodate this complexity. "
To answer this question, Ioan Kosztin, Professor of Physics at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of the MU, has partnered with King and has developed a theoretical model that shows that there are more and more A way in which a protein can break free from the membrane by taking several different routes. . They discovered that the protein-membrane interaction can exhibit "snagging" behavior.
"The behavior of capture links is similar to a Chinese finger trap, where, counter-intuitively, the more you shoot, the stronger the trap," said Kosztin. "Although similar behavior has been previously described at the cellular level, to our knowledge, this is the first report on protein-membrane interactions."
The researchers hope this discovery will serve as a basis for future studies on signaling pathways in cells and how drugs vary cell functions.
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Material provided by University of Missouri-Columbia. Note: Content can be changed for style and length.
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