Projects
Example projects for prospective graduate students and postdocs:
1) Measurement of the oligomerization of regulatory peptides such as PLB and PLM.
Oligomerization is a mechanism for tuning the inhibitory potency of these peptides, and we have shown that disordered oligomerization can lead to heart disease.
Example publications:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22110769
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21282613
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21220422
2) Investigation of the interaction of ion-motive ATPases SERCA and NKA with their regulatory partners PLB and PLM, respectively.
This project involves a variety of methods including biochemistry (crosslinking, western blotting, mass spec) and biophysics (FRET).
Examples:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21832088
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20643144
3) Measuring the structural dynamics of transport ATPases.
We have created transporters fused to multiple fluorescent proteins. These constructs are functional with respect to transport and ATPase activity, and they report transporter conformational changes as changes in FRET. For these experiments we use biophysical methods including fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) and fluorescence lifetime distribution analysis (FLDA).
Examples: