Structural biology

TL;DR: Some of the recent developments that advance the application of NMR to membrane proteins, with emphasis on structural studies in detergent-free, lipid bilayer samples that resemble the native environment are reviewed.

TL;DR: It is shown that Pf12 is highly conserved and under purifying selection, and details of its interaction with Pf41 reveal important insight into the structural and functional properties of this archetypal member of the 6-Cys protein family.

TL;DR: The structures indicate that allosteric inhibitors of human kinesin-5, which are being developed as anti-cancer therapeutics, bind to a motor conformation that occurs in the course of normal function, however, due to evolutionarily defined sequence variations in L5, this conformation is not adopted by invertebrate kinesIn-5s, explaining their resistance to drug inhibition.

TL;DR: Recently determined structures of the SNARE complex, synaptotagmin III, nSec1, domains of the NSF chaperone and its adaptor, and Rab3 and some of its effectors provide the framework for developing molecular models of vesicle fusion and for designing experiments to test these models.

TL;DR: Application and refinement of hyphenated mass spectrometry-based methods have yielded unprecedented insights in many areas, including membrane protein conformation, dynamics, lipid/ligand binding, and conformational perturbations due to ligandbinding, which can be challenging to study using other methods.